Advertisement

The Kangaroo Court

This is my June 11th "Huckabee" show monologue.

June 17, 2022

Nancy Pelosi has been conducting a kangaroo-court sham hearing about the January 6 riots, and it’s so theatrical that her committee hired a former “Good Morning, America” TV producer to stage it so it would be good TV. But it’s been very bad government. And the person who ought to be most ashamed of herself isn’t even Pelosi. It’s a pretend Republican from Wyoming, Liz Cheney.

According to the rules of the committee, there was supposed to be bipartisan participation, with the Republicans appointed by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. The names he submitted were real Republicans who were determined to make sure the committee acted in good faith. Well, Nancy couldn’t have that, so she arbitrarily rejected the Republican appointees and appointed her own lapdog pet Republicans who would run to the feeding dish when she rang the bell. The only two she could find who would disgrace themselves by being her tightly leashed love-pups were Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who at least had the dignity of not running again for his Congressional seat after he’s made a fool of himself by selling out to the likes of AOC and the radical Squad.

But Liz Cheney has no dignity left. Her personal animosity toward Donald Trump has eclipsed every last ounce of integrity she might have ever possessed, and she joyfully joined the most partisan and vicious Trump-haters in DC to try and blame Donald Trump for a breakdown in security at the Capitol, despite the irrefutable fact that he urged Pelosi, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, and others to allow him to supply up to 20,000 troops for security that day. They all turned him down, and then they had the audacity to blame him for a rally that turned into the riot.

The reason I hold Liz Cheney in such contempt is because she is pretending to be such the law-and-order stickler. But every conservative I know has clearly spoken out against those who did damage to property at the Capitol, or who threatened or challenged a police officer that day. But what Liz Cheney has NOT done is to demand an accounting for the unjustified shooting of the only person who died in the Capitol building that day—an unarmed woman and Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt who was shot dead by a Capitol Hill police officer –- but about which the details of the investigation have never been made completely public.

Liz Cheney has not demanded an accounting for Ashli Babbitt’s death. Nor has she said a word about the disgusting and humiliating treatment of Peter Navarro, who was arrested as he boarded a plane last Friday to come to Nashville to be on my show. The FBI office is literally next door to his apartment—next door! He offered in writing and on the phone to voluntarily come in should they wish to talk to him. Instead, they followed him to the airport and waited until he was boarding the flight to Nashville, when they arrested him, handcuffed him, and hauled him away in unnecessary humiliation. They then put him in leg shackles and strip-searched the 72-year-old Harvard scholar who had never been arrested.

Will Liz Cheney demand answers as to why he was treated this way but former Attorney General Eric Holder wasn’t? Holder was charged with criminal contempt of Congress, and even 17 Democrats voted for it because he refused to answer questions about the disastrous Fast-and-Furious operation that resulted in the death of border agent Brian Terry. And Adam Kinzinger, who cried about January 6, didn’t shed a tear about Ashli Babbitt or the treatment of Peter Navarro.

Here's what some of us want to see: Send Liz Cheney and other swamp creatures home and replace them with liberty-loving, courageous constitutionalists who will demand accountability for the corrupt officials at the FBI and DOJ and in the Biden White House who have persecuted their political opponents with the power of the government and hidden the crimes of the connected. As for Republican candidates or incumbents who won’t do that, vote them out and replace them with those who will fight for us and our country. And I mean fight like the third monkey on the ramp to Noah’s Ark when it starts to rain!

During NBC’s Thursday coverage of the January 6 committee hearings, they cut away to golf. Hey, it was the U.S. Open. Here’s Nick Arama at REDSTATE.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/06/16/what-nbc-did-during-jan-6-hearing-shows-just-how-much-dems-have-lost-americans-n579742

The focus on Thursday was Vice President Mike Pence and what he went through that day. Not that there was any cross-examination in an attempt to really know. We did learn that Pence spent several hours in a secure location, which appeared to be a loading area deep within the complex, and we heard committee Democrats praise him lavishly for his courage in not going along with Trump. Greg Jacob, former counsel to Pence, said that “Pence’s instinct” told him there was no way the framers of the Constitution intended the VP to have that kind of power.

It seems to me that being pulled into this story might actually have helped some viewers understand how Trump was feeling at the time. Obviously, he believed the election HAD been stolen by Democrats in those battleground states and that the Judicial Branch had not done its job. Yes, he chose to listen to the advisers who said what he wanted to hear, as we all do. And the way he saw it, he wasn’t trying to instigate a coup. He was hoping to prevent one, by the left. And some on the right did go way too far.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/house/january-6-hearing-pence-decision-to-certify-election

Mark Levin, speaking Thursday night on HANNITY, pointed out that while Biden, Schumer and Pelosi criticize Trump for not responding “quickly enough” to the January 6 riot, they still haven’t responded to the assassination plot against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanugh, which would certainly represent a more serious threat to our Republic than a bunch of unarmed ragtag Trump supporters.

They also haven’t responded to “the threats that are coming down, the potential need for the National Guard to protect the Supreme Court” when the decision is announced on their landmark abortion case.

He reminded viewers of how “extraordinarily violent” the left is, evoking the summer of 2020, the riots accompanying Trump’s inauguration –- to try to prevent HIM being sworn in as President (that apparently was okay) –- and the attack at the White House that injured 50 Secret Service agents.

So after putting January 6 in perspective, he said he was “disgusted” at the 40 minutes he watched on Thursday, seeing that it was “choreographed,” with teleprompters, spliced-up and cherry-picked video, and no contrary witnesses, contrary evidence, motions, challenges or cross-examination. No opposition whatsoever.

Even the legal analysts sit there on TV and say, we learned a lot today, he said. “You learned NOTHING."

As for the testimony regarding Pence, Levin pointed out that their chief witness, Michael Luttig, was not an adviser to Pence and never spoke to Pence. Levin’s sources close to Pence say Luttig “volunteered” his analysis by submitting it unsolicited to the Vice President’s office. None of that came out in testimony on Thursday --- could it possibly be because there was no cross-examination?

J. Michael Luttig is a conservative former federal judge who testified that Pence had no authority to stop Congress from certifying the election –- he had tweeted this on January 5 –- and that this would have brought on a “constitutional crisis.” He painted a picture of Trump as someone desperately trying to cling to power and called his efforts a “war on democracy.”

FORBES reports that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz clerked for Luttig and considers him to be a mentor. It would be very interesting to get Cruz’s take on his testimony. Amazingly, Luttig’s other law clerk was Trump attorney John Eastman, the very adviser who was the one encouraging Trump –- and Pence –- to challenge the election. What an interesting scenario. If only there were some real Republicans involved in these hearings, to bring in some cross-examination…

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/06/16/jan-6-hearings-who-is-j-michael-luttig-the-conservative-judge-who-opposed-pence-overturning-2020-election/?sh=631228967498

Levin also brought up the letter we reported on yesterday, from former U.S. attorney in Philadelphia William McSwain to President Trump, dating from June 2021. Recall that he was telling Trump that Attorney General Bill Barr had instructed him not to say anything publicly about the allegations of election “irregularities” that had been coming to his office, but to pass these along to the state attorney general, who had said Trump could not win.

“Wouldn’t it be nice when Barr was testifying, that somebody was there to challenge Barr? Somebody was there to challenge Luttig?” Levin asked. He pointed out that even some leftist legal professors agreed with Trump attorney John Eastman’s position “before it was John Eastman’s [and Trump’s] position.” The final say on election law was supposed to be with state legislators, he said, not with judges, and Levin holds that Trump “had every right” to ask state legislatures to look into these matters.

He also said it’s not clear under the 12th Amendment what the responsibilities of the Vice President are in such a situation. There needed to be challenges in the hearing about this.

“This is a railroad job,” Levin said of these hearings, “pure and simple. And it’s time the media get off its a-- and pay attention, and legal analysts act like real lawyers.”

Couldn’t have said it better.

Yesterday, we brought you three stories reaffirming that what we knew about the FBI was the tip of the iceberg. (Yes, this swamp has icebergs.) Today, there’s yet another story.

Thanks to Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Russia Hoax, we now get to see a very telling document –- a seven-page script of talking points prepared by senior FBI counsel Lisa Page for FBI Director James Comey ahead of his meetings the following day –- March 9, 2017 –- with leadership in the House and Senate. Declassified as part of pre-trial discovery, it shows how the FBI deceived Congress about the reliability of their made-up “evidence.”

And long after they knew the “dossier” was untrue, they let agents include it in their FISA applications as well.

Paul Sperry at RealClear Investigations has an excellent, must-read article that lays this out clearly. As Sperry reports, the talking points were “riddled with half-truths, outright falsehoods, and critical omissions.”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/06/09/fbi_chief_comey_misled_congresss_gang_of_8_over_russiagate_lisa_page_memo_reveals

These talking points concerned reports the FBI received in 2016 from a former confidential human source (CHS) alleging former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Carter Page conspired with the Kremlin in the 2016 election. The information she included –- and that Comey used in his meetings –- was known by the FBI to be untrue.

To help allay potential concerns by members of Congress about the quality of this information, Lisa Page suggested in her memo that Comey tell them that "some" of it had been corroborated and also that it came primarily from a “Russian-based source” –- which sounds a lot more credible than “the Clinton campaign,” ha. Igor Danchenko had a Russian name, but he was not in Russia. He was at the Hillary-affiliated Brookings Instittution, right here in the good old USA. Christopher Steele, who put the “dossier” together from unverified stories, was also American-based.

When Danchenko was first interviewed by the FBI in January 2017, he told them the stories he’d passed to Steele were just bar talk, laughed about over drinks with his girlfriend and a couple of high school buddies. Indeed, the special counsel’s indictment of Danchenko says the source for his most sensational stories about Trump –- including the one involving prostitutes in a Moscow hotel –- was made up. Danchenko never spoke to that person, and his other source was a longtime Hillary campaign adviser. (We know this was Charles Dolan, also associated with Hillary and the Brookings Institution. All roads lead to Hillary.)

The FBI did not reveal any of this to Congress, and they also concealed Christopher Steele’s identity and his connection to Hillary’s campaign.

Sperry’s report shows part of one page of this memo. Hilariously, the heading says “DELIBERATIVE PROCESS PRIVILEGED DOCUMENT,” with the word “DELIBERATIVE” highlighted for extra emphasis. Just saying a document is “deliberative” and “privileged” does not make it so, although, goodness knows, if Christopher Cooper were presiding again, he’d feel duty-bound to exclude it from his courtroom.

Lisa Page was full of suggestions for making their dubious sources seem more legit, including the use of the codename “CROWN,” most likely in reference to Steele, making it appear that the “dossier” was a product of British intelligence, as opposed to the HILLARY CLINTON CAMPAIGN.

According to the memo, Comey would also withhold from Congress the fact that Steele had been fired for leaking to the media.

Page wrote to him, “If asked about “CROWN/Steele” during the briefing, say only that “CROWN, a former FBI CHS, is a former friendly intelligence service employee who reported for about three years, and some of whose reporting has been corroborated.”

The official in charge of vetting Steele and Danchenko and corroborating their allegations was FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten. As Sperry reports, by March 2017, Auten knew the “Russian-based” claim was untrue, yet he let case agents slip it into two FISA renewals of the warrant to spy on Carter Page.

Unfortunately, the statute of limitations for the false-statement offenses relating to the March 2017 briefings has lapsed. The five-year statute of limitations related to the false information in the FISA applications expires at the end of this month. BUT...Durham could render these moot (to use a favorite expression of the Supreme Court) by filing conspiracy charges, for which the statute of limitations is seven years. As Sperry reports, “Some former FBI attorneys and prosecutors believe the special counsel is building a ‘conspiracy to defraud the government’ case against former FBI officials and others.”

Sperry goes on to explain how FBI officials Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, during a briefing on the Trump-Russia probe in March 2017, also misled acting Attorney General Dana Boente, as revealed in handwritten notes Boente took. (Boente was in charge of this because Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself.) They again used the “CROWN source reporting” lie. Strzok also lied to Boente --- and this is easily shown to be false --- that part of his probable cause for opening the investigation against Trump was his public call to Russia (which we all know was tongue-in-cheek) to find Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails (which we all know she deleted). They also told Boente their secret monitoring of Carter Page’s email and phone had been “fruitful,” when it had failed to corroborate anything in the “dossier.”

The following month, Boente signed the third application to surveil Page, based on what they had told him. As Sperry reports, the surveillance, which stretched through September 22, 2017, allowed the FBI “to potentially monitor the Trump presidency [!!!] through what is known as ‘incidental collections’ emails, texts, and phone and Skype conversations.”

Comey publicly announced the Crossfire Hurricane investigation on Capitol Hill in March 2017. Two months later, Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate Trump’s “collusion” with Russia in the 2016 election. It was all based on lies. Of course, Mueller never found evidence that Trump or any official or associate colluded with Russia. But, at the time, the media exploded. And Mueller, impressed with Lisa Page’s diligence –- gee, who wouldn’t be? –- hired her on the spot for his team.

Margot Cleveland had a more detailed piece last week on Boente’s handwritten notes and what they reveal. It gets more into the weeds, but one thing she suspects: the FBI’s phony emphasis on British “CROWN sourcing” makes it seem likely that the FISA court would’ve denied their application if the real sources had been known.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/07/why-handwritten-fbi-and-doj-notes-the-special-counsel-just-released-are-huge/

One good thing Cleveland mentions about the statute of limitations: The DC Circuit Court has held that if a defendant engages in a scheme to falsify, conceal or cover up material facts, the limitations period does not begin to run until the scheme ends.” She figures this takes us to June 29 of this year. That’s consistent with Sperry, who likewise specified “the end of the month.” Down to the wire!

One thing she still wonders about, though: What if the “CROWN sourcing” does actually refer to British spies, the same ones at Cambridge involved in trying to damage Michael Flynn during the Obama administration? Just when you think the plot couldn’t get any thicker, it (maybe) does.

https://twitter.com/ProfMJCleveland/status/1533578899573116931

.........................
The Igor Danchenko trial is about four months away.  If you'd like more backstory on that case, Margot Cleveland wrote something earlier this month providing some and pointing out the significance of the approximately 1,500 documents that Clinton's people at Fusion GPS withheld during the Sussmann trial under the auspices of "attorney-client privilege."  These would include conversations among Steele, Fusion GPS, and Marc Elias of Perkins Coie.  She says Durham needs to fight to obtain those documents.
   

Here are a couple of liberal narrative-busting stories that you likely won’t see covered in the mainstream media:

Last week in testimony to the House Oversight Committee, Lucretia Hughes, a black mom whose son was “shot point blank in the head” six years ago, told lawmakers that more gun control laws will not stop gun violence. She said her son was killed by a convicted felon with an illegally-obtained weapon, and that policies pushed by gun control advocates wouldn’t have prevented that.

https://www.theblaze.com/news/lucretia-hughes-blasts-gun-control

She said, “My son’s death resulted from a criminal with an evil heart and a justice system failing to hold him accountable for laws he had already broken.” She called it “crazy” to think the solution is more laws when there already are laws, including strict gun laws in blue cities, that aren’t being enforced, She also said law-abiding citizens need guns to protect themselves because the police aren’t doing it, adding, “I don’t need the government to save me.”

Echoing her comments was Jason Young of San Francisco, whose six-year-old son Jace was shot and killed in San Francisco in 2020. Jason told Fox News that more anti-gun laws aren’t the answer, holding criminals accountable is. Young and his family campaigned for the successful recall of criminal-coddling D.A. Chesa Boudin, who kept releasing offenders back onto the streets to do it again and again. Young said, "In my son's case, every suspect that was arrested in regards to his murder was apprehended again with another firearm during their arrest."

https://www.foxnews.com/us/san-francisco-needs-more-than-gun-control-stop-violence-father-slain-6-year-old-says

Not that it should matter, but both of the victims in these cases were black. Leftists constantly tell us that black lives matter, yet they impose policies that have greatly increased shootings and killings in black neighborhoods. If that’s more than a political slogan to them, then why don’t they prove it by adopting policies that prioritize saving black lives over making the lives of violent criminals easier?

During the January 6 committee hearings, a recorded testimony of former Attorney General Bill Barr was played in which he laughed derisively at the idea that the documentary 2,000 MULES should be taken seriously. He found the geotracking evidence from cellphone data “singularly unimpressive,” he said.

Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza didn’t take kindly to that. “The level of ignorance displayed by Bill Barr here is truly stunning,” he tweeted. “He doesn’t seem to understand the very concept of geotracking.”

He invited Barr to “a public debate” on election fraud. “What do you say, Bill? Do you dare back up your belly laughs with arguments that can withstand rebuttal and cross-examination?”

I’m not holding my breath, but...oh, please, do it. If Bill Barr can laugh at and dismiss what is shown in 2,000 MULES, it would be great to see him try debunking it. The other “debunkers” have certainly not been successful in doing so, though the media have attempted to make it look as if they had.

Anyway, bring it on. I know I’d much rather watch this debate than yet another hearing in Pelosi’s kangaroo court. It’s not as if we’re going to get any rebuttal or cross-examination in that.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/06/16/a-debate-between-dinesh-dsouza-and-bill-barr-is-one-we-need-to-have-n1605838

Bad economic news

June 17, 2022

Believe me, I’d much rather post a joke than news like this, but the news just refuses to cooperate. Wednesday, as the Biden White House once again reassured us that the economy is doing just super, the Commerce Department reported that retail sales dropped by 0.3% in May. That’s likely because Americans are putting so much money into their gas tanks, they’re cutting back on other spending.

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2022/06/16/economy-blues-retail-sales-fall-fed-raises-interest-rate-by-historic-75-percentage-point-n579327

Then on the same day came part two of the double whammy: the Fed announced that to try to bring down inflation, it was raising interest rates by .75% of a point, the biggest hike since 1994. And it’s likely not to be the last.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/fed-lifts-rates-smart-money-moves

The Fed assured Americans that it was not trying to deliberately induce a recession. How reassuring. Some analysts are saying that while we may “technically” already be in a recession, it’s not likely to feel like one to consumers.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/were-in-technical-recession-is-here-but-just-dont-realize-it-bank-of-america-sees-more-shocks-to-come-11654871607

That’s funny, because just last week, another analyst was saying that we may not technically be in a recession, but to consumers, it feels like we are.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/may-not-be-a-technical-recession-but-to-consumers-it-feels-like-one-says-ritholtz-managements-brown/vi-AAYjOlY

That does remind me of an old joke: that if you laid all the economists end-to-end, they still wouldn’t point in the same direction.

To try to end on a positive, or at least helpful, note, here are some things you should be doing now to protect yourself from the potential effects of higher interest rates.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-finance/fed-lifts-rates-smart-money-moves

 

At least 124 House Republicans sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, demanding that he investigate violent attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers as acts of domestic terrorism.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2022/06/15/gop-calls-on-garland-to-investigate-attacks-on-antiabortion-groups-as-domestic-terrorism-n2608812

The letter lists 11 instances of pro-life pregnancy centers, anti-abortion centers and churches being vandalized, firebombed and sprayed with threatening graffiti reading, “If abortions aren’t safe, then neither are you.”

And in case our politicized disgrace of an AG is too busy targeting non-woke parents to comprehend what a real domestic terrorist is, here’s a primer for him. An Antifa-linked pro-abortion group called Jane’s Revenge issued a blatantly terroristic threat online against pro-life organizations, reading in part:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/06/15/proabortoin-group-declares-open-season-on-crisis-pregnancy-centers-n2608778

"We offered an honourable way out. You could have walked away. Now the leash is off. And we will make it as hard as possible for your campaign of oppression to continue. We have demonstrated in the past month how easy and fun it is to attack. We are versatile, we are mercurial, and we answer to no one but ourselves. We promised to take increasingly drastic measures against oppressive infrastructures. Rest assured that we will, and those measures may not come in the form of something so easily cleaned up as fire and graffiti.

From here forward, any anti-choice group who closes their doors, and stops operating will no longer be a target. But until you do, it’s open season, and we know where your operations are. The infrastructure of the enslavers will not survive. We will never stop, back down, slow down, or retreat…”

You know what would make them stop? Throwing them into prison for about 20 years. AG Garland, THAT is your job, not harassing critics of Biden policies. If they are organizing and leaving threats online, then they are creating electronic trails that the FBI can use to trace, identify and arrest them. You were able to locate harmless grannies who wandered into the Capitol on January 6th to take a selfie and treat them like terrorists. Now, try using that same set of skills to hunt down and arrest these actual terrorists.


According to transgender activists, anything anyone does that they don’t like, from requiring schools to notify parents that they want to give their kids dangerous chemicals and irreversible surgery to comedians telling jokes about their excesses, is going to result in trans kids dying. To be clear, what they’re actually talking about is these kids killing themselves. One would think that if you’re dealing with a group of young people who are that at risk of suicide, you’d want to get them psychological counseling rather than drugs and surgery. But even Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki called that “medically necessary, life-saving” treatment for gender dysphoria. To even suggest psychological counseling gets you branded as transphobic and, you guessed it, will result in more trans kids dying.

To back this up, activists point to studies claiming that suicide rates are higher among kids who are denied hormones and gender surgery. But since we’re talking about kids’ lives, shouldn’t we actually confirm whether or not that’s true?

A new analysis funded by the Heritage Foundation uncovered serious flaws in these studies that are detailed at length here:

https://www.heritage.org/gender/report/puberty-blockers-cross-sex-hormones-and-youth-suicide

The study also found that far from reducing suicides, in 2020, in states that allow hormone therapy and other “gender-reassignment” procedures without parental consent, there were on average 1.6 more suicides per 100,000 residents age 12-23. That’s 14% higher than the average state suicide rate in that age group from 1999-2020. The analysts say an observable rise in suicides began when these hormone therapies became available. They believe there’s a connection. Others will deny a causal link, but if, as they claim, these procedures reduce suicides, why are suicides rising in places there they’re most easily available?

I would think that this study would merit some serious discussion. If it doesn’t, if it’s just ignored and swept under the rug, then I would take that as a pretty good indicator that for all the talk about saving kids’ lives, their lives really take a back seat to pushing a particular social/political agenda.

 

We’ve said for a long time that what we find out about the DOJ’s malfeasance is the tip of the iceberg.  A few more stories currently dripping out support that view.

The NEW YORK POST, through a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request, finally received a heavily redacted (of course) DOJ inspector general report on former top FBI official Michael Steinbach. Apparently he’d violated policy by unofficially appointing himself a media liaison. As the POST reports, Steinbach had “’numerous unauthorized contacts with the media’ that began when he was the bureau’s assistant counterterrorism director and continued after he was named executive assistant director of its National Security bureau in February 2016.” By “numerous,” the report was talking about hundreds.

Since the Office of Inspector General can’t compel individuals to be interviewed unless they currently work at the DOJ, Steinbach himself was never interviewed for the FBI probe. He abruptly resigned in February 2017 and thus gave this internal affairs investigation the slip. “Prosecution was declined,” according to the report. We would add that since Director Comey also left the bureau in May 2017 --- when Trump fired him --- there was no way after that for the OIG to ask him if this media connection was Steinbach’s own idea or was encouraged from the top. Perhaps there are memos...

It’s not clear from the NY POST story when this OIG report was issued. Former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who stepped in for Comey after Comey was fired by Trump, quit the agency “ahead of agency review,” according to BBC News on January 30, 2018. He had been scheduled to retire in March, but Director Chris Wray had apparently pressured him to quit “in advance of an inspector general report examining the agency.” Recall that McCabe was under his own cloud for approving a leak to the press and lying about it. These guys are all as slippery as a snake covered in Vaseline.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42865202

Though we haven’t heard his name before, Steinbach, according to the POST, was “overseeing the controversial investigation into Donald Trump’s suspected ties with Russia.”

But what he also was doing can only be described as schmoozing with the press. It would be nice to know the names of the reporters he was corresponding with, but they’ve been redacted. After being invited to the 2015 Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner, he solicited another reporter for a $300 ticket to the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Association gala and reception.

He boasted about being there to an unidentified CNN reporter, who wrote back, “I put you on the map and now you’re cheating on me with [REDACTED].

The POST story quotes more of the schmoozing by this FBI official. It’s pretty sickening.

“The OIG notes it was unable to determine who paid for the drinks or meals during these social engagements.” We can guess, but that’s not really the point. Here’s he point: a strongly politicized FBI was using the media as personal scribes to spread whatever narrative they wanted.

Though the OIG couldn’t interview Steinbach, another FBI official who was interviewed said Steinbach had told him Comey “was trying to change the way the FBI dealt with the media.” Either Steinbach was justifying his own behavior, or Comey really approved this little outreach program. As this unidentified official explained it, “...When you take your credentials out, it needs to mean something. And the only way to do that is to have the trust. And the only way to get the trust is to have good will and the media is a part of that, right?”

When it came to the Trump-Russia Hoax, the FBI sure seemed to have a lot of friends in the media. Steinbach apparently was one of those cultivating that. It came in handy.

https://nypost.com/2022/06/14/fbis-michael-steinbach-had-numerous-contacts-with-media-watchdog/

That story meshes well with another report from a couple of weeks ago from Jerry Dunleavy at WASHINGTON EXAMINER about another top FBI official. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley said that Timothy Thibault, FBI assistant special agent in charge and leader of the Washington field office handling public corruption matters and other criminal investigations, “likely violated several federal regulations and Department guidelines designed to prevent political bias from infecting FBI matters, including the Attorney General Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations and FBI social media policies...”

The nature of Thibault’s social media presence had apparently been brought to Grassley’s attention. “...Thibault’s social media postings, comments and ‘likes’...demonstrate a pattern of improper commentary related to, for example, ongoing FBI investigations including those under his purview.” Grassley described this as “active public partisanship,” with Thibault even using his official title in these withering criticisms of anything GOP. “Accordingly, his actions present a grave risk of political infection and bias in his official decision-making process...”

Grassley called on Inspector General Michael Horowitz to investigate and sent letters to Director Wray and Attorney General Garland that set June 14 as the deadline for them to share documents related to this official. It’s now June 16.

The EXAMINER story includes numerous examples of Thibault’s over-the-top partisan social media posts. To cite just one: he retweeted a Lincoln Project tweet that said, “Donald Trump is a psychologically broken, embittered and deeply unhappy man,” with a link to the corresponding ATLANTIC article. In contrast, according to him, Barack Obama could do no wrong; his only scandal as President “was wearing a tan suit.” Hey, at least this FBI official was telling us what he really thought instead of hiding his partisanship in the name of following FBI “policy.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/senate/grassley-raises-alarm-over-partisan-social-media-posts-linked-to-fbi-official

Legal analyst Andrew C. McCarthy briefly outlined his concerns about this for NATIONAL REVIEW in a piece called “What the Hell Happened to the FBI?” He points out that the Washington field office “handles many of federal law enforcement’s most politically charged investigations.” This politically-charged individual is in charge of all that, which might explain a lot.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-the-hell-has-happened-to-the-fbi-chapter-342872/

Finally, last week, Judicial Watch reported receiving 102 pages of documents from the DOJ regarding the death of Ashli Babbitt in the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. These reflected some facts we’d already known, such as that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia had declined to prosecute shooter Michael Byrd and that he hadn’t even been made to fill out a police report or other documents.

But there was something else that shows how words are used for propaganda purposes. The words “group” and “crowd” in the original drafts were later changed to the more loaded word “mob.” Five times, just to drive the point home. As in: “Because Ms. McEntee [Babbitt] was an active participant in a ‘mob’ that had just illegally entered the Capitol building, and then broke out the glass doors and removed barricades to forcefully gain entry into the Speaker’s Lobby, there is insufficient evidence to refute Lieutenant Byrd’s fear for his life or the life of others at the time he discharged his weapon.”

Ashli's widower insists she was not participating, but instead was trying to stop the break-in to the Speaker's Lobby.  But the DOJ avoided accountability.

Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch says these documents show Byrd got special treatment. Byrd “shot an unarmed woman for no good reason,” he said. “I suspect that this unjustified shooting isn’t of much interest to the...January 6 committee.”

https://www.judicialwatch.org/doj-memo-declining-criminal-prosecution-for-ashli-babbitts-shooter/

I hate to break it to you, because I know how much you were looking forward to this today, but the scheduled January 6 committee meeting has been postponed.

All together now: “AWWWWWW!!!”

One stated reason was that they needed more time to prepare their video “evidence.” Well, that’s certainly understandable, given that it takes time to go through reams and reams of video, select only the most useful clips, and edit them to create just the right flow and the appearance of guilt. It might even be necessary again to drop in some audio of President Trump speaking from some other time and place. The art of propaganda can’t be rushed.

Also, there was reportedly infighting over whether to make criminal referrals.  They should make one on themselves.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/06/14/january-6th-committee-suddenly-postpones-hearing-after-infighting-begins-n578433

https://beckernews.com/jan-6-committee-member-makes-another-embarrassing-announcement-about-upcoming-hearing-45367/

“Republican” committee member Adam Kinzinger tweeted that they simply want to “space out” the hearings. Nobody buys this.

Anyway, as long as we’re waiting for the next scintillating installment, this is a great time to look at some of the issues that won’t be mentioned by the committee at all.

Kyle Becker brings up another hearing, this one by the Senate Judiciary Committee in January of this year, in which Texas Rep. Ted Cruz grilled an essentially non-responsive Jill Sanborn, the FBI’s executive assistant director of the National Security Branch, concerning certain events on January 5-6, 2021. She wouldn’t answer, citing “sources and methods.” Sources and methods for WHAT?

It “feels” as if the FBI were invoking the Fifth Amendment.

https://beckernews.com/senator-ted-cruz-confronts-fbi-official-point-blank-about-the-feds-role-in-january-6-45376/

Here are the questions she would not answer AT ALL:

--- How many FBI agents or confidential informants actively participated in the events of January 6?

--- Did ANY FBI agents or confidential informants actively participate in the events of January 6?

--- Did any FBI agents or confidential informants commit crimes of violence on January 6?

–- Did any FBI agents or confidential informants actively encourage and incite crimes of violence on January 6?

–- Who is Ray Epps? (She said she was “aware of the individual” but had nothing beyond that.)

–- Was Ray Epps a Fed? (“Sir, I cannot answer that question.”)

–- Did Mr. Epps urge them to tear down the barricades?”

“I can’t answer that,” was Sanborn’s standard answer.

Here’s the original story posted by TOWNHALL the day of this cringeworthy exchange.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2022/01/11/ted-cruz-fbi-january-6-riot-n2601698

Ray Epps, from Arizona, was captured on video the night before the rally saying, “Tomorrow, we need to get into the Capitol! Into the Capitol!” His focus on this struck the people around him as so strange and suspicious that they started chanting, “Fed! Fed! Fed! Fed!” But when asked if Ray Epps was indeed a Fed, Sanborn refused to provide that information.

If he were NOT a Fed, then answering would not have given away any sources and/or methods.

The January 6 committee did put out a statement on Ray Epps, for what that’s worth (which is to say, nothing): “The Select Committee is aware of unsupported claims that Ray Epps was an FBI informant based on the fact that he was on the FBI Most Wanted list and then was removed [in July] from the list without being charged. The Select Committee has interviewed Mr. Epps, [who] informed us that he was not employed by, working with, or acting at the direction of any law enforcement agency on January 5th or 6th or at any other time, and that he has never been an informant for the FBI or any other law enforcement agency.” Well, that’s good enough for us! Just kidding; it’s not.

As reported in the WESTERN JOURNAL, our esteemed attorney general wouldn’t answer questions about this, either. Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie posted the video described above in October and tweeted, “I just played this video for AG Merrick Garland [during a House hearing]. He refused to comment on how many agents or assets of the federal government were present in the crowd on Jan. 5th and 6th and how many entered the Capitol.”

The WJ story also recalls other situations in which the FBI used informants, including to spy on Trump’s campaign (Stefan Halper), and the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

https://www.westernjournal.com/watch-ted-cruz-backs-fbi-corner-relentless-line-questions-jan-6th/

So, another question for the FBI not to answer would be, “Why was Ray Epps removed from the Most Wanted list?”

But we’re not just dealing with evasiveness and secrecy in this “investigation.” Nick Arama at REDSTATE reports that the committee has been caught in another outright lie, smearing Georgia Rep. Barry Loudermilk for supposedly giving a “reconnaissance” tour of the Capitol building to protesters the day before the rally, when he did no such thing. Reps. Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney demanded that he voluntarily testify and explain his actions, and released that letter to the media to spread the rumor.

The infuriating details are here.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/06/14/j6-committee-gets-busted-trying-to-spread-a-whopper-n578474

Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis, who pressed the Capitol Police to look at the evidence and clear Loudermilk, said Democrats who smeared him need to face accountability before the House Ethics Committee. Think they will? Hah, that’s funny.

Rep. Loudermilk is fighting back himself, though, calling for accountability not just for the Democrats who smeared him but also for the media who helped them do it. “We need these journalistic outlets to actually act like journalists,” he said, “not a wing of the progressive left Socialist Democrat Party, which is what they’ve become. And that’s why the American people have lost faith in the mainstream media, because they actually don’t believe anything they report.”

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/loudermilk-says-he-heard-about-jan-6-subpoena-over-news-theyre-trying-push

There’s also more about former Attorney General Bill Barr’s perplexing and inconsistent comments about election fraud. President Trump released a letter from William McSwain, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania from 2018 till January 2021, in which he’d expressed dismay to Trump about instructions he said he’d received from Barr “not to make any public statements or put out any press releases regarding possible election irregularities,” of which McSwain had received a number of reports.  He said he was also told “to pass along serious allegations to the State Attorney General for investigation –- the same State Attorney General who had already declared you could not win.” McSwain also told Trump he was “right to be upset” with the way officials ran the 2020 election in Pennsylvania.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/trump-releases-letter-from-ex-us-attorney-criticizing-doj-handling-of-election-fraud-claims

This story still needs some sorting out, and I don’t mean by the “fact”-checkers who worked swiftly to try to dismiss it. Barr denied McSwain’s allegation to the WASHINGTON POST, saying McSwain’s comments to Trump appeared to be designed to “mollify” him to gain his support. Barr has maintained there was no evidence the election was stolen, yet he’s also said there WAS fraud --- in the form of the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story --- that potentially changed the outcome.

So, define “stolen.”

Finally, here’s an excellent article from Julie Kelly of AMERICAN GREATNESS, whose reporting on January 6 is unmatched.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/13/january-6-for-non-dummies/

And check out her book, now in paperback: “JANUARY 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War On Terror Against the Political Right.” Forward by Lee Smith, author of THE PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT and THE PERMANENT COUP.

After hearing that the point of Nancy Pelosi’s January 6th Kangaroo Kommittee and its low-rated prime time show trial was to make the case that former President Trump should be indicted on various federal charges (I assume including trespassing for living rent-free in Democrats’ heads), Chairman Rep. Ben Thompson said the Committee will not make any criminal referrals of Trump or anyone else to the DOJ.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/06/13/open-civil-war-breaks-out-on-the-january-6th-committee-after-statement-on-a-possible-donald-trump-criminal-referral-n578292

Thompson said, “No, that’s not our job. Our job is to look at the facts and circumstances around January 6th, what caused it and make recommendations after that.”

If getting Trump isn’t their job, then someone failed to give the message to Liz Cheney, who immediately contradicted Thompson. But in fact, indicting people not only isn’t their job, it’s not within their authority, as Thompson correctly stated. They aren’t a grand jury. They shouldn’t even be able to subpoena people, much less have them arrested for defying their subpoenas, considering that the Committee is illegitimately formed in violation of the resolution creating it.

Of course, this could just be a way of attempting to sound magnanimous and above politics as they back down from their blustering rhetoric, so they don’t have to admit they’ve wasted $8 million and months of our time on a political vendetta that would never stand up in court, or that they have no evidence other than their partisan suppositions of what was going through Trump’s mind and bits and pieces of testimony wrenched out of context or altered.

Or maybe they realized that this dog just wasn’t going to hunt when even MSNBC uber-liberal Rachel Maddow admitted that it was impossible for Trump’s rally speech to have incited the breach of the Capitol that was already happening far away, before he’d finished speaking.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/06/13/what-even-rachel-maddow-isnt-drinking-the-j6-committees-kool-aid-n1605087

For the record, the Monday session included lots of Trump bashing but still no new actual evidence. But Julie Kelly at American Greatness has an excellent primer to explain the truth of what happened on January 6th, minus the “well-oiled fog machine.” It’s called, “January 6 for Non-Dummies.” Share it with your friends who watch CNN.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/13/january-6-for-non-dummies/

Today, June 14, is Flag Day, the day set aside to honor the United States flag. It commemorates the day in 1777 that the Second Continental Congress adopted the official design for our first national flag. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed Flag Day into law, so we can’t say there wasn’t something good he did. (Sorry; had to get in my little jab at Woodrow Wilson.) 

I had the pleasure on Sunday of singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a celebration of Flag Day held by the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks in Fort Worth, Texas. I’ve done this once before and not only got to express my patriotism by singing the national anthem –- it seems I love it more every year –- but also learned a lot of history about the flag (and the Elks) from the presentation…

Such as: The significance of the American flag is that it is emblematic of the crowning virtue, charity; of justice for all; of brotherly love; and of fidelity. These are the “cardinal principles” of the Elks. “By them,” the Elks say, “we teach love of country and of our countrymen and loyalty to our American way of life. To be an Elk is to be an American citizen who lives for his country and is ready to die for it.”

In his Flag Day prayer, the Chaplain asked God to bless our flag and entreats, “Through the years to come, may this flag wave as the banner of liberty, freedom and enlightenment. May this service bring to each of us a sense of loyalty to our country and enable us to be better patriots, truer citizens, and more loyal Americans, to Thy glory and to the honor of this great nation.”

Then a trustee took us through a history of all the versions of the American flag. A small regiment of high school students in ROTC came to the front one by one, accompanied by historic pieces of music, solemnly carrying the succession of designs. These included the yellow, snake-embellished “DON’T TREAD ON ME” flag that I personally would like to see revived as a companion to our official Stars & Stripes. The design is riveting, and I especially like that sentiment now.  Where can I get one of those?

I can’t tell you how refreshing this ceremony was after sitting through the sickening and thoroughly UN-American January 6 hearing last Thursday. There was not a hint of politics in this Flag Day ceremony, even though its emphasis on God and patriotism leaves little doubt as to which way its members lean politically. These are people who care deeply about devotion and duty, in service not to themselves but to higher principles. Yes, this mindset still exists.

And these were the nicest people. It’s easy to see that this isn’t just talk --- they really live it.

Still, there was one thing that left me a little sad. In that big room full of round banquet tables, all looking lovely with white tablecloths and flag centerpieces, most of the tables were empty. In fact, before they were about to start, I even asked the officials on the dais if they’d thought about “holding the curtain” for a few minutes in case more showed up. They said no, they’d go ahead as planned.

After it was over, one of them explained to me that, as he put it, “The average age in this group is 72.” Covid, of course, had caused some to avoid crowds in the past couple of years, and I'm not sure they even had it in 2020.  But also, their ranks have naturally thinned over time. It seemed to me that this tradition must have skipped a couple of generations, with seniors represented, along with seniors of the high school variety –- the ones in ROTC –- but very few folks in between.

So I have a suggestion. If you have a calendar for next year, find the Sunday just before June 14 and go ahead and mark it “Flag Day Celebration.” Then go to the website for the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, where you can read more about them and also enter your zip code to find the Elks lodge closest to you.

https://www.elks.org

I can’t think of a better, more inspiring way to celebrate Flag Day than to take your whole family –- all the generations –- to this event, meet some nice people, eat a big stuffed baked potato and learn a lot about the history of the American flag and its meaning, or at least what it’s supposed to mean.

As for that, I’ll leave you with something President Wilson said about that: “This flag, which we honor and under which we serve, is the emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and shape of this nation. It has no other character than that which we give it from generation to generation. The choices are ours.”

In other words, we define it. That’s why it’s up to us to make sure the flag continues to stand for the best in ourselves and in our country.

Here’s more about Flag Day and some suggestions for how to celebrate it today.

https://nationaltoday.com/flag-day/

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, at the conclusion of Monday’s hearing, said the committee appeared to be trying to “lay the foundation” for what they’ve claimed was an attempted coup. But what this really seems to be is a sort of “persona non grata” trial, he said, intended to show that Trump is “a horrible person.”

Turley laughed at something that happened at the end on Monday that he said “sort of put a pin on it” regarding the outrageously one-sided nature of these hearings. “The most telling moment,” he said, was when the chairman said he was going to “introduce this video, unless there is an objection.” Of course, everyone knew there would not be an objection! Who could imagine Liz Cheney suddenly rising to her feet and saying, “Wait, this seems unfair! Maybe we need to look at other evidence to be introduced as well!” That will not be happening.

“..This sort of emphasized,” he said, “there ISN’T anyone to object.”

He’s right --- we won’t be seeing any Perry Mason-like moment when someone in the room lets conscience prevail and tearfully sputters, “I confess! We’re all guilty! This hearing is a sham! We just couldn’t help ourselves!” These people don’t have consciences.

Turley observed that this one-sidedness is a “signature move,” a “fairly common practice” by Speaker Pelosi. She “muscles through, to get the conclusion she wants.” In the first Trump impeachment, for example, she “decided to forego investigation in the Judiciary Committee and the calling of essential witnesses.” In the second impeachment, “she did one better: she had a ‘snap impeachment,’ with no hearings at all.” I would add that she had to move lightning-fast because at that point, Trump was practically out the door. She had to get in just one more impeachment before he left!

But Turley isn’t so sure she’ll get the conclusion she wants. Other than hard-core anti-Trumpers, people will see that there’s no other side presented, the ‘other side’ being not that violent protest was a good thing but that key issues such as the deliberately lax security at the Capitol are not being examined at all.

He also made the point that through all the chaos, the system actually “did actually work to some extent.” Well, it worked in that power was indeed transferred; that’s about all that can be said for it.

We would add that to support their desired conclusion, Liz Cheney had to lie, saying, for example, “Donald Trump did not condemn the attack,” when he did –- unequivocally –- in a heartfelt Oval Office address. Read what he said at the link, here. He also condemned the violence on Twitter; Twitter blocked him. Cheney is a bald-faced liar, but, by design, there was no one at the hearing to point out her lies.

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/donald-trump-liz-cheney-fact-check-condemn/2022/06/09/id/1073784/

(By the way, as of this writing, President Biden has yet to condemn the unlawful protests at Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home or even the aborted attempt to kill him, which most of the media have ignored as well. Kayleigh McEnany and I spoke about this, and the double standard of justice in general, on last night’’s HANNITY.)

Legal analyst Andrew C. McCarthy said Monday’s hearing was a “much tighter production” than Thursday because it had one theme: Trump must have KNOWN the election was not stolen because those around him were “telling him it was nonsense.” That’s a compelling story to tell, but they’ve set it up in a way that's "not a fair process that’s aimed at getting to the truth and giving whatever contra-arguments there are their day in court.”

So, it’s “more like messaging than it is like a real investigation," he said. No kidding. “I could have been very impressive in court if there were no defense lawyers, you know?” he laughed. “You let the government put on its own case, own witnesses, own exhibits, and then no cross-examination and no defense arguments; I’d have been 1,000-and-0.”

He later said he did not think they’re doing this to stop Trump from running again –- he thinks they might even prefer that he run –- but to set up the case against Trump in case he does. They also want to deliver what they hope would be “the predicates” for criminal prosecution against him. McCarthy is concerned that Biden’s DOJ has been giving in to “the loudest voices on the progressive left” and that a Trump prosecution is what they want, no matter how it divides the country.

Monday evening, Brit Hume echoed what McCarthy had observed, saying that the Democrats might find out “they’ve done the Republican Party a great service” if they stain Trump too much for him to run again. “Because I think many Republicans think they can’t win with Trump at the head of the ticket again. They’re afraid of his supporters --- don’t want to come out against him directly, but they’d like him to go away. If the effect of this committee is to make his possible candidacy go away, I think a great many Republicans would privately be very glad.”

That thought is consistent with our new poll, which, in breaking news, has just concluded and shows a very strong preference for DeSantis over Trump, 56.6 percent to 42.2 percent. (For “someone else,” 2.1 percent.)

Even so, I’d like to think that if Hume had had time to elaborate, he would also have said that, to any conservative, the Democrats’ flagrant abuse of the system to achieve that goal is far too great a price to pay.

But maybe the Democrat’s main goal is something else entirely. According to top Democrat strategist Murshed Zaheed, the primary purpose is “fundraising for a lot of the Democratic Party institutions and establishments.” What the heck, they spent $8 million of YOUR MONEY on this extravaganza, and they’re expecting a big payoff on that investment! Zaheed’s tweets will give you a good “inside” view.

https://valiantnews.com/2022/06/top-democrat-strategist-admits-primary-purpose-of-january-6-hearings-is-fundraising/

Oh, and here's a bit of good news:  Last week, my writers said they would much rather have been watching the re-run of “Young Sheldon” that normally would have run on CBS Thursday night. The ratings are in, and, according to the WASHINGTON FREE BEACON, the January 6 hearing actually did worse in the ratings than the “Young Sheldon” re-run that had aired the previous week. Of course, my writers still wish they could have watched “Young Sheldon," along with just about anything else that would have been on afterwards. That was 2-1/2 hours of their lives they’ll never get back.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/resistance-porn-ratings-fail-jan-6-committee-hearing-crushed-by-young-sheldon-rerun/

Former Texas Rep. Ron Paul elaborates:

https://cnsnews.com/commentary/ron-paul/ron-paul-out-desperation-dems-resurrect-insurrection-theater

………………………..

One last thing, about Bill Barr. You already know that Democrats have been exploiting clips of him expressing doubt early on about 2020 election fraud. (NOTE:  We could cherry-pick other quotes that give the opposite impression of his view on fraud.)  Barr laughed heartily at the mention of Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary 2,000 MULES, saying he was not impressed. D’Souza shot back at him in a series of insulting tweets, calling Barr ignorant about geotracking –- which, ironically, was used to find the precise location of January 6 protesters –- and saying, “I’d be happy to appear before the committee and debunk all the debunkers. Let’s settle the issue of who’s perpetrating the ‘big lie’ through open debate...With Bill Barr and Liz Cheney ranting today about the documentary, it’s the perfect occasion to watch 2,000 MULES and see for yourself what the brouhaha is about.”

That we’d love to see. But we never will.

https://www.independentsentinel.com/bill-barr-belly-laughs-at-2000-mules-documentary/

Kavanaugh Shooter Update

June 13, 2022

The 911 call that led to the arrest of the armed young man outside SCOTUS Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home confirmed that he came there intending to kill Kavanaugh because he was all fired up by incendiary rhetoric about the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade. We know this because the would-be assassin made the call himself.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2022/06/10/911-call-confirm-that-alleged-wouldbe-killer-of-justice-brett-kavanaugh-motivated-by-anger-over-abortion-guns-n2608567

He said he found the house thanks to an article containing a photo and the address (nice doxing job, guys), but when he saw there were officers there, he left and called 911 to give himself up. He admitted needing psychiatric help and said he wanted to be fully compliant.

We can learn a few things from this. Like how incredibly dangerous it is to print the addresses of Supreme Court Justices. And how shockingly irresponsible it is for people like Chuck Schumer to make threatening comments intended to influence the judges’ votes, knowing that there might be mentally unstable people listening and taking him seriously (if you listen to Chuck Schumer at all and take him seriously, you’re likely mentally unstable.) And we learn that the gun didn’t come to shoot a Justice all by itself. As is often the case, it was carried there by someone who had mental health issues.

Of course, some people are incapable of learning, which is why radical pro-abortion groups like Ruth Sent Us are continuing their unconscionable intimidation campaign against not only the Justices but Amy Coney Barrett’s children at her school. And we learn that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s refusal to enforce federal law against harassment of judges at their homes is not only emboldening these dangerous people, it’s also adding more grounds for Garland’s inevitable (and I hope, swift) impeachment in the upcoming GOP Congress.

Related: The New York Times buried the story below 16 other stories, and headlined it, “Armed Man is Arrested Near Home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.” Wonder how they would’ve treated it if it had been an armed man in a MAGA cap admitting he intended to assassinate Justice Sotomayor?

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/06/08/press-coverage-on-the-assassination-attempt-of-justice-kavanuagh/

From Joey P, on Substack:

My goodness. And the networks really believe I will tune into this poopoo show. Good luck.

From Scott Adams podcast (Episode 1771), “Real Coffee With Scott Adams”:

“Let me say this: Any time people show you edited video, whether the clip is edited or it’s put together with the other clips from other things, and any time they put an audio overlay over that, especially if the audio comes from a different time or place, which is what the January 6 committee is doing…are we not sophisticated enough yet as voters and the public to know that when anybody does this, it’s propaganda? It wouldn’t matter who did it. If the Pope makes you a “mix” video, it’s propaganda.”

You are being manipulated. If your best friend does this, “he’s not your friend. I don’t know how much more clearly I can say it.”

“Every bit of that is criminal, basically, or should be criminal. We’re allowing our government to do something right in front of us that should be against the law [when the other side isn’t allowed to respond]. But the only reason it’s not is that the people doing it make the laws….and I’m kind of amazed that we put up with it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdVjvuYfA4Q

We’ve said it wasn’t the riot that was a threat to democracy, but the REACTION to the riot, and Adams observed essentially the same thing: “If I had to rank them for which was worse, the events of January 6 or the hearings, it’s not even close. The events of January 6, with the violence: REALLY BAD. But, it’s not as bad as what the Democrats are doing in the hearings. I consider that worse, ‘cause the risks are higher. There was no risk that the country was going to be overthrown on January 6...but this hearing...to me, this is a gut-punch to the Republic.”

The fact that we even allow this makes Adams want to “have an insurrection right now,” he said. He never felt the urge before, but he does now. It’s the lack of any counter-argument. The Democrats are doing this with such impunity, that –- although he stressed he does NOT recommend violence –- he said that if he “were going to do an insurrection, they’re talking me into it.”

Adams thinks there should be “a hearing about the hearings.” The GOP, when they retake the House, should look into why these hearings were allowed to happen and how they were put together, “and then the Democrats should not be allowed to respond,” haha. He’d also like to see impeachment for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for his incitement of violence against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who was refused a seat on the January 6 committee by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said essentially the same this weekend on “Sunday Morning Futures.” We need to see ALL depositions, ALL documents, he said. He also reminded us that the committee had previously altered evidence, a text exchange between him and Mark Meadows. Those snakes had to admit it in December of last year. Don't believe anything they put in front of you in these hearings.

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/06/12/jim-jordan-january-6-committee-has-altered-evidence-and-lied-to-the-american-people-about-it/

I would add that we'll also need to find out about the elephant in the room: the FBI’s role (before and during the event), and the lack of security in spite of the FBI’s intel report to Capitol Police just days before. Another question: why did they not ever locate the person who planted a bomb outside RNC and DNC headquarters? What’s the real story with that?

In Tucker Carlson’s Friday monologue, he explained why this “hearing” –- shown, he said, on every news network except FOX News –- wasn’t a real hearing, because in a real hearing, “the other side can speak.” That’s what we’ve been saying: that Thursday was essentially a prosecutor’s opening statement. Actually, two things are missing from a prosecutor’s opening statement: 1) any opposition, and 2) EVIDENCE. Selectively edited video is not evidence.

And, yes, NEWSMAX did finally give in and run the political theatre --- to provide it “without the spin,” they said. At least they had some good commentators, such as former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker and legal analyst Alan Dershowitz.

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/jan-6-hearing-probe-trump-democrats/2022/06/09/id/1073671/

This literally was a show trial, to the point where it was scripted and read off teleprompters.

Tucker’s hypothesis is that they’re doing this because every minute they devote to January 6 “and some imaginary threat from QAnon” is another minute “they’re not covering the collapse of the American economy.” As I’ve said, when leftists first started mentioning the so-called right-wing menace of QAnon, my staff and I had to look it up, because we didn’t know what it was.

Later in his broadcast, he recalled what so many seem to have forgotten: “It was just two years ago, live on television, summer of 2020, a mob of Biden voters tried to storm the White House; remember this? They torched a church across the street. They attacked Secret Service officers. A mob called for the President of the United States to be lynched. He was taken to an underground bunker for safety. We don’t like to be hysterical, so we kind of downplayed it at the time…”

“This is what our country’s capitol looked like,” he said, with video of raging fire, broken glass and protesters breaking down barriers in the background.

“It’s just too much,” Tucker said. “Stop lying to us! Stop telling us things that we know for a fact are not true. We watched them in real time.” But no, we’re expected to believe that “January 6, 2021, remains the single worst thing ever to happen to America.”

Ashli Babbitt’s widower Aaron was also on the show. We’ve learned more about her shooting death in recent days, such as that killer Michael Byrd admitted he knew Ashli was likely unarmed, that he never even had to file a police report, and that he received a $200 donation on his GoFundMe page from –- get ready –- committee member Adam Kinzinger. As you know, the committee on Thursday night never mentioned Ashli’s name.

…………………………

Interesting note about Monday morning’s hearing: In an announcement late Sunday, one of the people called to testify --- in his case by subpoena --- is 2020 Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien. Stepien now happens to be campaign manager for Harriet Hageman, Liz Cheney’s Trump-endorsed opponent in her Wyoming congressional race, who is beating Cheney up in the polls. So, Liz Cheney will be interrogating her current opponent’s campaign manager. (Of course, Cheney’s side, the “prosecution,” is the only side doing any questioning.) This is one more hop away from the rules for this kangaroo court.

Jonathan Swan reports that a knowledgable source tells him Stepien might not be a “friendly” witness. Maybe he’s not fond of kangaroos.

Upon hearing this development, Taylor Budowich, communciations director for Trump and Save America, tweeted: “This circus is beyond embarrassment and will forever stain the integrity of Congress.”

https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2022/06/12/new-surprise-january-6-witness-means-liz-cheney-will-be-interrogating-her-opponents-campaign-manager-on-tv-sounds-legit/

Nick Arama at REDSTATE comments:

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/06/12/surprise-witness-called-by-j6-committee-reveals-big-conflict-for-liz-cheney-n577833


RELATED VIDEO

The TV ratings are in for the Democrats’ big prime time, anti-Trump show trial, and they are grim. Although to be fair, they’re better than I expected. I thought the audience might be three people: me and my two writers, who were forced to watch it so you wouldn’t have to.

The good news for Democrats is that over 11 million people total watched it on ABC, CBS and NBC. The bad news for them is that the combined daily viewership of those networks' non-prime time evening news shows is usually around 18 million. A few million more watched on CNN and MSNBC, but they were preaching to their choir of rabid Trump-hating viewers, so that wasn’t the audience they needed to convince (and even with the ratings boost, CNN still had 340,000 fewer viewers than Fox News’ regular lineup.)

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/06/10/trainwreck-ratings-are-in-for-jan-6-committee-production-n577240

To give you an idea of how bad that was, 3.24 million people watched the hearing on CBS. That’s 600,000 fewer than watched last week’s rerun of “Young Sheldon” in the same time slot. And on both CBS and ABC, the audience dropped in the second hour as viewers tuned out.

The public has now had a chance to see that the January 6th Kangaroo Kommittee has no game-changing new evidence or revelations, just a lot of dark innuendo, biased narratives and selectively-edited video and testimony. They may be planning days more of this political theater, but since they had just one shot at prime time and didn’t show it then, I assume they have no blockbusters that they’re saving for 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. What they gave us was, to quote Shakespeare, “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Most Americans think the riot was deplorable, but they have far bigger problems to worry about now, and Congress should be dealing with those instead of obsessing over trying to indict Trump. Not that this Committee should be completely ignored. The next Congress will have to investigate it thoroughly and change the rules so that such a biased, illegitimate and unconstitutional abuse of power never happens again.

And for those who do still care about both what really happened on January 6th and why this Committee isn’t really even trying to find out, try this.

https://www.westernjournal.com/gop-rep-draws-line-sand-refuses-order-illegitimate-jan-6-committee/

And here’s a list of Democrats, including members of this very committee, who previously tried to block the certification of elections of Republican Presidents, back before they decided that was insurrection.

https://www.conservative.org/2022/06/09/liberal-hypocrisy/

Here’s a page set up by a conservative site to counter disinformation related to January 6th.

https://www.conservative.org/j6/

Finally, while Democrats keep falsely claiming that police officers were killed on January 6th, the widower of the only person actually killed, unarmed protester Ashli Babbitt, has spoken out in the wake of the televised hearing where her name wasn’t even mentioned.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/ashli-babbitts-widower-speaks-out-on-january-6-hearing

So much for free speech

June 13, 2022

Remember free speech? That was great while it lasted, wasn’t it? It obviously no longer exists in the Washington Commanders (formerly Redskins) organization, where defensive coach Jack Del Rio was fined $100,000, even after he apologized for asking why we were making so much of a “dust-up at the Capitol,” where nothing was burned down, but an entire summer of “riots, looting, burning and destruction of personal property,” where people’s livelihoods were destroyed and businesses were burned down, is never discussed and “no problem.” He tried to explain, “I just think it’s kind of two standards and if we apply the same standard and we’re going to be reasonable with each other, let’s have a discussion.”

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/06/washington-commanders-fine-defensive-coach-jack-del-rio-100000-calling-january-6-capitol-riot-dust-compared-george-floyd-riots/

For that, head coach Ron Rivera accused him of drawing an equivalence “between the events of that dark day and peaceful protests, which are a hallmark of our democracy.” He went on, “I want to make it clear that our organization will not tolerate any equivalency between those who demanded justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the actions of those on Jan. 6 who sought to topple our government.”

Certainly, there were “peaceful protests,” but I think he was likely referring instead to the people who tried to burn down a courthouse with people inside; and whose violence, looting, arson and vandalism left 19 people dead and over 2,000 police officers and an unknown number of civilians injured, and caused damages estimated at up to $2 billion, the costliest civil unrest in US history.

FYI, just to show how fair I am, I’m going to link to a liberal site that attempts to downplay the riots and debunk that figure.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/politics/how-much-damage-did-summer-2020-riots-really-cause-202945

Also because I find it amusing that even though the writer twists the facts like a pretzel to make it sound not so bad, in the end, he still has to admit that, yeah, it could’ve been as high as $2 billion. But insurance companies had to pay most of it so it doesn’t count, apparently. Because insurance companies don’t raise everyone’s rates when their costs go sky high.

That’s like saying that we all aren’t losing our free speech rights, just because Jack Del Rio was the one who has to pay a $100,000 fine for making a perfectly reasonable statement that millions of Americans agree with.

One who agrees and who is still exercising his right to really free speech is author/blogger Larry Correia, who unleashed a brutal Twitter thread about why most Americans don’t care about January 6th. Warning: really bad language alert. He might have to put $100,000 into the swear jar.

https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2022/06/10/now-they-know-how-it-feels-to-be-afraid-thread-on-the-ugly-truth-about-what-regular-americans-really-think-about-january-6-is-straight-fire/

Gannett wakes up

June 13, 2022

We’re mad as heck and we aren’t gonna take it anymore: The newspaper chain Gannett may have finally gotten “woke” in a good way, as in “Woke up to reality and realized they’d go out of business if they didn’t stop annoying readers with leftist lectures.”

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2022/06/10/parent-co-gannett-tells-usa-today-enough-with-the-opinions-already-n577264

The Daily Mail reports that a committee of editors presented a report to Gannett in April, warning them that people are turning away from USA Today and other Gannett-owned papers because they’re fed up with the leftist bias, both in editorials and supposed “news” stories. The editors said that not only are these leftist editorials among the least-read content, but were frequently cited as reasons for canceling subscriptions.

They noted that the public’s trust in the news media had plummeted in recent years due to leftwing bias, and that “readers don’t want us to tell them what to think. They don’t believe we have the expertise to tell anyone what to think on most issues.” Sounds like the readers are definitely smarter than the writers in that regard. They also suggested that the papers hire writers who aren’t leftwing activists. Ironically, that probably means hiring journalists who didn’t attend “journalism” school.

In response, Gannett is scaling back the number of editorials and ending political endorsements except in local races. This reminds me of the old joke about what you call it when a thousand lawyers are dropped into shark-infested waters: “A good start.” Both CNN and Gannett are finally scaling back the leftist activism as a survival measure, but there’s still so much of it infesting “journalism” that the people writing it may not even realize they’re doing it. Maybe they just assume that since everyone they know is a Republican-hating leftist, they spew that attitude without even thinking about it.

The entertainment media echo chambers are particularly bad about this. One of my writers who handles pop culture stories canceled his subscription to weekly Variety (for which he was paying a rock bottom professional rate of something like a dollar a year) because the leftist bias was so thick that even at two cents an issue, it wasn’t worth it. He was also a longtime subscriber to Entertainment Weekly, where you would find Obama cheerleading or Bush and Trump bashing in everything from record reviews to movie previews. He didn’t have to cancel that because they recently stopped publishing it.

Sunday, a group of 10 Senate Republicans and 10 Democrats announced that they had reached a “breakthrough” deal on a "framework" of new gun laws. It’s not yet in the form of legislation. It doesn’t ban any particular guns, the way many Democrats want; but it includes money for mental health and school security, it would add juvenile records to background checks for any gun buyers under 21, it would deny guns to people convicted of domestic violence, and it includes grants for states to institute “red flag” laws.

https://www.westernjournal.com/breaking-report-gun-legislation-deal-reached-10-gop-senators-responsible/ 

These Republicans argue that it would be easier for people caught in red flag laws to appeal on the state level, but I’d say that depends on the state. Some of the provisions are sensible, like increasing school security, while others sound sensible on the surface but wouldn’t have prevented recent school shootings (for instance, most of the shooters didn’t have anything on their records for a background check to catch.)

Even though having the support of 10 Republicans might seem to make this a slam dunk in the Senate, it’s not clear whether Democrats who are pushing for much more radical plans will settle for it, or whether these Republicans will all stand firm after they hear from their constituents, or after they see what Democrats might try to add to it. And it will take 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

In the meantime, conservative commentators are wondering why Republicans so close to a midterm election would want to tick off their constituents by backing new anti-gun laws that are wildly unpopular with them? (Daniel Horowitz, senior editor at The Blaze, noticed that of those 10 GOP Senators, four are retiring and none of the others are running for reelection this year. Coincidence?)

Even laws as seemingly reasonable as red flag laws can be abused to deny Second Amendment rights to someone who’s done nothing wrong. Good luck trying to convince Republican voters that they can trust the government never to falsely brand them as dangerous extremists or domestic terrorists.

The NRA issued a statement, but declined to go into detail until the “framework” actually becomes a piece of legislation.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nra-real-solutions-stop-violence-bipartisan-agreement-gun-framework

At these links, Rick Moran of PJ Media and Spencer Brown of Townhall.com have more thoughts on this subject.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/06/12/senators-strike-bipartisan-framework-for-a-gun-safety-deal-n1604982

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2022/06/12/heres-what-senators-came-up-with-for-a-deal-on-new-gun-laws-n2608602

And Kevin Downey of PJ Media goes further, pointing out that Democrat DA’s aren’t even trying to arrest and lock up the people who are committing the vast majority of shootings. They call it “social justice” or “justice reform,” but Downey’s theory is that leftist DA’s have deliberately created a crime wave to give them an excuse to disarm the law-abiding.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/kevindowneyjr/2022/06/11/the-real-reason-the-left-wont-sign-effective-gun-safety-measures-n1603813

There seems to be no bottom for President Biden’s poll numbers, with even his base now crumbling under him like a California house during a mudslide. A new Quinnipiac poll found that he’s now losing his most loyal constituency, black voters. His approval with them has dropped 14 points since April and is now at 49%, below the majority level for the first time.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/06/08/poll-only-49-percent-of-black-voters-approve-of-bidens-job-performance-down-14-points-since-april/

With whites, his approval is down to 32% with 60% disapproving, and worst of all is his approval rating with Hispanics: 24%. This is being chalked up to the toll taken on working people by rampant inflation, record gas prices and out-of-control crime in blue cities.

That dismal approval number among Hispanics, and the growing number of Hispanic voters turning Republican, likely explains this story:

In a move that critics say “reeks of desperation,” a group of Hispanic investors with financial backing from leftist billionaire George Soros (the same man who bankrolled the DA’s who created that out-of-control crime) has purchased 18 Spanish language radio stations across 10 cities. They plan to use them to counter conservative Spanish stations, which the group’s founders, former Obama staffer Stephanie Valencia and Obama and Hillary Clinton campaign veteran Jess Morales Rocketto, accuse of spreading “misinformation.” Like what, that inflation is rampant, gas prices are at record highs and crime is out of control? Or just "misinformation" under the current definition: "true stuff I don't want anyone to talk about."

https://www.foxnews.com/media/george-soros-hispanic-radio-stations-reeks-desperation

They must not have much faith in the intelligence of Hispanic Americans to believe they can be convinced to ignore what they see with their own eyes and are living through every day. Hispanics are only too familiar with nations where monopoly media outlets pump out 24/7 leftist propaganda. But even in a nation as isolated as Cuba, the people are smart enough to know that they’re being lied to.

FYI: the group is called the “Latino Media Network” (not “Latinx?”), so if you hear that name or the initials “LMN,” you’ll know what you’re dealing with. Just think of LMN as standing for “Lies Mean Nothing.”

While the Democrats are trying desperately to convince us that Donald Trump is personally responsible for the January 6th riot, here’s a round-up of seven of the most recent of many violent/terrorist attacks on conservatives by leftwing extremists that seem to be directly inspired by irresponsible, incendiary rhetoric by top Democrat politicians.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/06/09/7-recent-acts-of-leftist-extremism-targeted-at-political-foes/

Will anyone hold them to account for inciting violence, even attempted assassination of a Supreme Court Justice? I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

Related: Remember when politicians at least had the decency to say that the children of public figures were “out of bounds” for attacks? (I mean actual children, not like Hunter Biden.) That ethical standard has been steadily eroding. Now, thanks to radical pro-abortion extremists, the children of Supreme Court Justices they disagree with are considered to be acceptable targets for harassment and terroristic threats.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/06/09/disgusting-pro-abortion-radicals-threaten-supreme-court-justices-children-n1604351

I agree with Stephen Kruiser of P.J. Media that these despicable people in groups like “Ruth Sent Us” (I’m sure Ruth Bader Ginsburg would recoil at them using her name) are “a criminal enterprise, not a protest group,” and they “need to have some harsh legal consequences visited upon them soon.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/06/10/the-morning-briefing-pro-murder-abortion-ghouls-are-really-getting-out-of-control-n1604579

Let’s all hope that Merrick Garland’s “Justice” Department finds a few minutes free in its busy schedule of harassing and arresting the Democrats’ political opponents to actually enforce the law and arrest these bullying thugs.

Also, here’s more on the accusation that the Biden FBI is purging its ranks of any employees who are conservative or who question the partisanship and skewed priorities of the agency under Biden.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/jim-jordan-shares-allegations-of-fbi-purge-over-jan-6

I guess they aren’t supposed to notice things like Biden joking to Jimmy Kimmel about sending his Republican opponents to jail, and then the very next morning, the FBI arresting the leading GOP candidate for Governor of Michigan on charges related to him being in Washington on January 6th, 2021. These are all misdemeanor charges that amount to him filming the crowd and “gesturing.” Yet it was vitally important that they make this very public arrest just before the hyped-up January 6 Committee TV extravaganza.

https://redstate.com/streiff/2022/06/09/fbi-arrests-gop-candidate-for-governor-of-michigan-over-january-6-misdemeanors-and-what-that-means-for-2024-n576324

From kicking Republican candidates off the ballot to arresting them on dubious charges, it seems that someone is desperate to ensure that Gretchen Whitmer gets reelected. For some inexplicable reason, Stockholm Syndrome perhaps, Whitmer is currently safely ahead in the polls. I sincerely hope the voters come to their senses and realize that virtually any Republican short of Liz Cheney would be an immense improvement over power-mad Gretchen Whitmer.

From Cheryl A, on Substack:

I won’t be watching the kangaroo court. I don’t even recognize America anymore. I feel like I woke up in a parallel universe. Where is that portal? I want out!

……………………..

Honestly, we deserve hazard pay for watching last night. All those toxic fumes.

The Democrats --- they say their committee is bipartisan, but it isn’t --- said Thursday’s hearing would be “like an opening statement.” And it was, but only from the prosecution.  In other words, this may have been billed as a hearing, but we're "hearing" just one side. This kangaroo committee was not formed according to the rules, and their stated goal is to show a “nexus” between President Trump, his allies, and the siege of the Capitol building to violate the will of the people.

To do this, they have to lie and selectively edit. Democracy was never really at risk because of anything those unarmed protesters did. Nobody took over anything, and if they’d had proper security, the breach would’ve been prevented. Biden became President –- happy now? If democracy is at risk, it’s because of the REACTION to those protesters --- labeling Trump supporters “domestic terrorists,” denying any problems with the election, marginalizing roughly half the country, and monitoring American citizens.

“This has all been produced down to the minute,” Bret Baier said on FOX Business News as Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi called the hearing to order. His opening remarks, right out of the gate, recalled the small Mississippi town of his birth, where people used to “justify the actions of slavery, Ku Klux Klan, and lynching.” Never mind that these evils all came courtesy of the Democrat Party –- he said they’d been brought to mind by “the actions of the insurrectionists in 2021.” Ah, we were off to a good start.

Predictably, he brought up the oath that, ever since the Civil War, elected officials and government employees have taken. This was introduced to prevent Southern rebels from “holding a position of public trust.” He said, “That oath was put to test on January 6th,” likening those who breached the Capitol that day with those who’d fought against the Union in 1862. This is the strategy Democrats want to use to disqualify certain members of Congress, and (of course) President Trump, from running again.

“It was domestic enemies of the Constitution,” he said, “who stormed the Capitol, and occupied the Capitol, who sought to thwart the will of the people” (except he said “thowrt”) “to stop the transfer of power.” All Presidents in our nation’s history had accepted the will of the people, he said, “except Donald Trump.”

Thompson apparently knows the 2020 election was perfectly above-board. The American people voted Trump out, he said, and “it was not because of a rigged system,” he added confidently. Then he played a clip from former Attorney General Bill Barr saying that in December 2020 he had advised that “he did not think the election was stolen.” In fact, he had called that idea BS. But that soon after the election, did Barr –- or anyone –- really have that much to go on? Doubtful.

“Donald Trump had his days in court to challenge the results,” Thompson said. “He lost in the courts, just as he did at the ballot box.” (Actually, that’s untrue; the courts rejected his claims without looking at evidence.) “That’s the end of the line. But for Donald Trump, that was only the beginning of what became a sprawling, multi-step conspiracy aimed at overturning the Presidential election, aimed at throwing out the votes of millions of Americans –- YOUR votes –- in our democracy and replacing the will of the American people with his will to remain in power after his term ended.”

Again, not true. In spite of what some (not all) advisers were telling him, Trump firmly believed the election had been stolen, and that he was trying to fulfill the people’s will.

“Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy,” Thompson lied again. “And, ultimately, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down [to] the Capitol and subvert American democracy.

“Any legal jargon you hear about seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States [NOTE: be prepared for a lot of that] boils down to this: January 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup, ‘a brazen attempt,’ as one writer put it shortly after January 6, ‘to overthrow the government.’ The violence was no accident. It represents ‘Trump’s Last Stand,’ [his] most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.”

So there it is. Wow, Rep. Thompson laid it on even thicker than we’d thought he would. Of course, you and I (and President Trump) know this isn’t what Trump was doing at all. Doesn’t matter; the most outrageously partisan and extreme interpretation of events is what Thompson led with.  He apparently wants Trump charged with sedition.

Oh, and he hilariously denied that this is a political attack on Trump by people who don’t like him. “That’s not the case,” he lied. He said Trump’s people “didn’t want January 6 investigated at all.” On the contrary, they’d welcome neutral parties looking into numerous aspects –- say, the FBI’s role, and the curious lack of security. Think we’ll get that here?

The next committee member to give a statement was “Republican” Liz Cheney. She put up a tweet Trump sent at 6:01 PM January 6 and read aloud from it, conveniently leaving out the part that said, “Go home with love & in peace.”

Cheney must have relished her role as prosecutor. “President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she said. “...Over multiple months, Donald Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.” She then played selected, context-free clips --- again with no opportunity for more questioning.

She said that in the coming weeks, there would be testimony from officials who’d been in the West Wing that day and had “begged” Trump to do something to stop the protesters. Will there be any cross-examination of those witnesses? NO.

Having no cross-examination is why the Democrats’ big show is ultimately meaningless, though it cost $8 million of taxpayers’ money. The entire committee is advocating for one side. It’s as I said yesterday: Imagine how differently the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial would have gone if there had been no cross-examination of Amber Heard.

The committee hopes their dramatic video of violence and chaos at the Capitol will tear at emotions. Yes, the violence was abhorrent, and we all recall sitting stunned on that day, watching in horror. I know of no Republican who thinks otherwise –- Donald Trump included, no matter what came out of his mouth in anger as it unfolded. This had to be the worst possible turn of events for Trump himself. As we’ve said but the committee did not, Trump had offered Speaker Pelosi up to 20,000 National Guard troops to protect against this very thing.

Notice that the phrase “in the coming weeks” was repeated a lot. Good grief, how much lying are we supposed to endure? Most Americans don’t blame Trump at this point and surely will see this for what it is. (And they might be able to put it into perspective now that we’ve had an attempt on the life of a Supreme Court justice, a story that THE NEW YORK TIMES buried on page twenty-something.) There are hearings next Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. I wonder if networks might pull the plug on this in-kind contribution to the Democrat Party if the ratings tank.

Anyway, let’s not waste more time on this one-sided sideshow. Let’s move on to what some legal experts and other commentators have to say...

………………………..

First, here’s a strong antidote, which we know you need. Tucker Carlson said, “This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying and we are not going to let them do it.”

“The whole thing is insulting,” he said. “In fact, it’s deranged, and we’re not playing along.”

https://thepostmillennial.com/watch-tucker-carlson-calls-out-media-for-airing-jan-6-committee-trial-during-primetime

Nancy’s committee obviously has it in for Peter Navarro, and this piece looks at why.

https://thebluestateconservative.com/2022/06/09/why-peter-navarro-is-on-the-biden-administrations-hit-list/

The Democrats say January 6 was a carefully plotted event, staged by Donald Trump himself. Really? Seemed pretty ragtag to us, especially when compared to the raging violence of BLM/Antifa. Derek Hunter at TOWNHALL spares no words.

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2022/06/09/hey-democrats-no-one-gives-a-damn-about-your-hearing-n2608422

Jeremy Brown is a Green Beret –- served his country for 20 years –- and Republican candidate for Congress in Florida. He is also a Jan. 6 political prisoner. He called tonight’s hearing “a well-orchestrated and highly produced lie meant to target the minds and perceptions of the uninformed and misinformed masses with intent to demonize and dehumanize their opposition.”

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/06/orchestrated-highly-produced-lie-political-prisoner-jeremy-brown-releases-moving-statement-prison-cell-day-regimes-kangaroo-committee-nightly-broadcast/

Republican Rep. Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, who was originally appointed to the committee but was pulled by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy when Pelosi refused to seat Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, said McCarthy made the right call. He was asked by Shannon Bream about something Cheney told her Republican colleagues who are, Cheney said, “defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone. But your dishonor will remain.”  (Yes, she said that.)

He chose to respond more generally about the committee itself, saying, “...We’re kicking minority members off of committees, we’re silencing the voices of entire constituencies, and I can tell you from ten years of practicing law, the hardest cases are when you need your rules and your procedures to work best. They’re not when you get to change them to fix a narrative, and that’s exactly what has happened with this committee from the beginning. They’re putting pressure on DOJ, they’re getting mad at DOJ...they’re issuing subpoenas and contempt charges without any merit whatsoever...” He says the House isn’t working the way it should because rules and procedures are not being honored.

BREITBART NEWS has a good write-up full of excellent updates and some refreshing tweets. The reviews are in, and they are bad. Also, Jason Miller, featured in a video clip during the hearing, says he was deceptively edited. It also appears they overlaid Trump’s voice onto footage of the Capitol violence. Not a good look for the committee.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/06/09/january-6-committee-hearing-livewire-democrats-push-all-in-on-capitol-riot-probe/

At REDSTATE, we see committee members were using teleprompters and Democrats were trying to “temper expectations,” as they really had nothing we don’t already know. More outstanding tweets here as well.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/06/09/hilarious-jan-6-committee-now-trying-to-temper-expectations-as-cheney-and-schiff-spin-like-crazy-n576837

In related news, law professor Jonathan Turley criticized FBI Director Chris Wray for calling the January 6 riot “domestic terrorism,” after the DOJ finally up-charged key Proud Boys leaders on Monday with seditious conspiracy.

https://theconservativeopinion.com/turley-rips-fbi-wray-for-labeling-january-6th-riot-domestic-terrorism/

And here’s Jim Banks --- Kevin McCarthy's choice for the committee until Pelosi refused to seat him --- with eight questions that remain unanswered about January 6. His questions will give you an idea of why she didn’t want him NEAR that committee!

https://pjmedia.com/columns/marktapscott/2022/06/09/eight-key-questions-the-january-6-committee-will-not-answer-and-one-nancy-pelosi-cant-avoid-n1604460


RELATED VIDEO

Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media has some brutally funny comments about the January 6th Committee Good Time Variety Hour and its openly-admitted purpose: to try to distract Americans from the real problems they’re dealing with and keep Democrats in power in November so they can keep creating more of them.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/06/08/the-morning-briefing-karma-will-not-be-kind-to-the-j6-kangaroo-court-commies-n1603965

By the way, I know how expensive it is to produce a TV show, so let me save them some money by telling the real root cause of the January 6th riots: it’s the pathological, psychotic Trump Derangement Syndrome of Nancy Pelosi and Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Knowing there would be a large partisan crowd, Trump offered 20,000 National Guard troops to insure safety and order. And without even thinking about what would be wise or prudent, they not only refused the help, they attacked Trump for offering it, because that was their response to everything he had done ever since he dared to deny Hillary Clinton her ordained coronation as President. So they could never, ever work with him on anything. If Trump was for it, it must be BAD!

That’s why we no longer have border security, energy independence or a foreign policy that prioritizes American interests, and why they’re trying to undo a tax cut that helped 80% of Americans. Because Trump IS THE DEVIL!! It’s the kind of mindless, psychotic obsession that we used to treat by putting people into psychiatric institutions, not the institutions of government.

So if you really care about these people, in November, please, take pity and remove them from the place where their obsession is allowed to foment and send them home, where they can finally get the mental health treatment they so desperately need.

From Huckabee reader Margaret K, on Substack:

I trust Mike Huckabee's team, as I don't have the wherewithal to watch 2 hours of political theatre interspersed with leftwing commentary by network "political experts."

From Rick, also on Substack:

Once again, Thank You! I pretty well abide by your suggestion to let you follow the news and keep us informed. It helps!

………………….

Thanks, readers! Of course, you’ll have to try hard to avoid seeing Thursday’s primetime telecast of Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 committee hearings.

We call it “The January 6 Propaganda Machine Good-Time Show.” But this completely one-sided anti-Trump extravaganza, produced by former ABC president and news producer James Goldston, will run on ABC as “Attack on the Capitol: The Investigation.” On NBC, the simultaneous coverage is billed as “NBC News Special: The January 6 Hearings.” On CBS, it’s “CBS News: Capitol Assault Hearings.” On MSNBC, it’s “The January 6th Hearings: The House Investigates.” At CNN, they’re more dramatic, calling it “Attack on Democracy: The January 6th Hearings.” On FOX BUSINESS NEWS (yes, they’re running it), it’s simply called “January 6th Committee Hearing.”

The propaganda machine is wall to wall.

I wonder if this being shoved down our throats has anything to do with the American people gradually coming to see this was not Trump’s fault. According to an NBC poll taken in May, a minority now hold him mostly responsible. Panicked Democrats have to do something about this right away, as January 6 is all they have.

https://cloudflarepoc.newsmax.com/newsfront/capitol-riot-january-6-committee-public-hearing/2022/06/06/id/1073183/

So they’ve brought in the big dogs, propaganda-wise, in what must be the biggest in-kind contribution to Democrats in political history. And Thursday is only the beginning –- this is really about the next election, and the next. As reported by NBC San Diego, “The hearings are expected to be exhaustive but not the final word from the committee. It plans to release subsequent reports on its findings, including recommendations on legislative reforms, ahead of the midterm elections.”

But New York GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik of the House Judiciary Committee said Wednesday that the GOP would be “all over the airwaves, setting the record straight” with “a slew of events and media appearances” of their own.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/house/all-over-airwaves-trump-aligned-republicans-ready-plan-to-drown-out-jan-6-hearings

The challenge, though, will be finding any of it. “All over the airwaves” –- that won’t be happening. And even with FBN showing Nancy's hearings, some Democrats have expressed rage that FOX News isn’t showing this propaganda, too. Nothing short of full compliance will satisfy them.

If you can stomach some leftist spin, this CNN opinion piece predicts the GOP counterprogramming “will fail.” I say that if it does, that will only be because the media have systematically shut it out.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/05/opinions/trump-january-6-committee-hearings-obeidallah/index.html

CNN thinks it’s “despicable” for Trump allies to try to be heard, even though, as ranking Judiciary Committee member Jim Jordan of Ohio has noted, Pelosi’s committee has set it up so there will be NO CROSS-EXAMINATION OF WITNESSES in her hearings. (Do you think Nancy’s hand-picked “Republicans,” Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, will do that? Get real.) This might be a first: completely one-sided hearings! Goodness, if legitimate legal proceedings didn’t allow for cross-examination, they really would be kangaroo courts. Imagine how the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial would’ve gone if no one had been able to cross-examine Amber Heard.

So, who IS showing the Republicans’ counterprogramming? Good question. Axios say it’s limited to the GOPs’ own platforms, such as Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” “Real America’s Voice,” and Trump’s Truth Social and Save America PAC. So it'll be preaching to the converted. FOX News will run its normal programming.

https://www.axios.com/2022/06/03/trump-january-6-hearings-republicans

Here’s one example of counterprogramming that NEWSMAX has already reported:

https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/marjorie-taylor-greene-jan-6-committee-hearing/2022/06/08/id/1073534/

Come to think of it, Nancy’s hearings might turn out to be unintentionally hilarious. Her star witness, Nick Quested, a British filmmaker who followed the Proud Boys, once posted on Instagram (now deleted) that only one cop was stationed on the Capitol steps and someone “in authority” opened the door for protesters to come inside in a “deliberate act.” Oops!
Oh, wait, that would only come out in cross-examination...

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/06/08/democrat-star-jan-6-witness-someone-in-authority-left-the-door-open-at-capitol-mob-walked-in/

At least the FOX News opinion shows are fighting back. Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue from Wednesday is not to be missed. He describes what Trump’s rally actually was, aside from the foolhardy breach of the Capitol by some acting on their own, and asks many of the questions that won’t be mentioned in Nancy’s hearings.

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6307489805112#sp=show-clips

As I often say, “we watch the news, so you don’t have to,” so you can count on us to keep an eye on the proceedings, though my writers tell me they’d much rather watch the re-run of YOUNG SHELDON that would normally be on CBS. We hope the ratings all tank, and that the only three people watching at all are us, because, well, we have to.

We’d also make the point that in the year-and-a-half since the protest, there have been numerous investigations and analyses that cause many to doubt even more the legitimacy of the election. We don’t have a definitive answer to that question yet, but it’s understandable why some people wanted to take a pause before certifying the vote. That’s all they wanted. If some got rowdy –- and yes, foolishly, some did –- it was out of frustration that the Justice Department was not hearing them and, arguably, not doing their job to SAFEGUARD “our democracy.”

To me, the big take-away from the incident is that if anything is a “threat to democracy,” it’s the growing suspicion that our election outcomes are fake. Anyone questioning those outcomes deserves not to be silenced but to receive proof that they haven’t been rigged. We got the opposite of that; we got the curtain slamming down.

What we’d like to see is Nancy and her winged monkeys very, very sorry in the end that they did this. And perhaps that will happen. Steve Bannon, who’s been charged with criminal contempt of Congress for not “cooperating,” has served subpoenas to Nancy herself and her nine committee members, plus Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Rep. Jim Clyburn, three staffers and the House general counsel, seeking documents relating to the decision to refer his case for a criminal trial. These would also include anything having to do with how the committee was set up in the first place. His trial is scheduled for July 18.

Some legal experts are saying that House members and staff will be shielded by the Speech and Debate Clause. That would be ironic, considering Bannon is refusing to cooperate because the President is supposed to be shielded by executive privilege. Details here.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10893701/Steve-Bannon-SUBPOENAS-Nancy-Pelosi-members-January-6-committee.html

Both Bannon and Peter Navarro hold that they don’t have to respond to subpoenas by an illegitimate committee. But now the DOJ is reportedly trying to make Navararo shut up about it.

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/doj-peter-navarro-order-indictment/2022/06/08/id/1073507/

Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs has a must-read piece explaining why he refuses to testify. “I have watched the Star Chamber proceedings...and have reached the conclusion that not only is it illegitimately formed, in violation of the rules of the House, it is manifestly organized for one purpose: a search and destroy mission against any and all perceived political enemies.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/08/why-i-refuse-to-testify-before-the-illegitimate-january-6-committee/

I’ll leave you with this definition, from Merriam-Webster:

KANGAROO COURT, noun

1) a mock court in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted

2) a court characterized by irresponsible, unauthorized, or irregular status or procedures

………………

In related news, remember the “Governmental Disinformation Board,” to be run by that Mary Poppins person? Nanny Nina is gone, but, importantly, the board itself has not been disbanded.
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley has obtained leaked documents that show it was NOT set up just to handle disinformation from foreign sources, as we’d been told. (Why, that was disinformation!)  Their “rumor control program” was to monitor Americans as well (as we always knew it was). And, get this: Part of its reason for being was that some Americans were questioning --- get ready --- election integrity and January 6.
Well, we can’t have that!

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6307492022112#sp=show-clips

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/06/bidens-failed-disinformation-governance-board-making-plans-censor-americans-hold-opposing-views/

As Democrats gear up for tonight’s big attempt to convince you that a couple of hundred rioters 17 months ago represent the entire Republican Party and are the biggest, most violent, extremist threat to our democracy in America, the news seems to be aligning to convince the public otherwise.

Here’s a story about escalating vandalism and fire-bombing of pro-life pregnancy centers by pro-abortion domestic terrorists whom I seriously doubt vote Republican.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kavanaugh-assassination-attempt-violence-intimidation-pro-lifers

And then there’s the 26-year-old California man arrested yesterday outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s family’s home. One group that’s been encouraging protesters to illegally target judges' homes initially tried to suggest that it was overblown and he probably didn’t even have a gun. In fact, he was reportedly carrying a black tactical chest rig, a Glock 17 pistol with two magazines and ammo, pepper spray, zip ties, a knife, hammer, screwdriver, duct tape, crow bar and other items.

He told police he was all fired up over the leaked decision overturning Roe v. Wade and the Uvalde killings. He thought Kavanaugh would vote to end Roe and protect the Second Amendment, so he decided to “give his life purpose” by murdering Kavanaugh.

Questions are now reasonably being raised that if Trump and his staffers can be legally hounded for words they spoke, then why isn’t Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer liable for inciting an assassination attempt?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/06/08/is-chuck-schumer-culpable-for-the-death-threat-against-justice-kavanaugh-n1604111

He’s become infamous for threatening SCOTUS Justices on more than one occasion if he thought they were going to rule in some way he didn’t like. Most recently, he declared about the leaked ruling, “I want to tell you, Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Gorsuch, you have unleashed a whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hits you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Now, why would an unstable leftist think that was a message from an authority figure encouraging an attack on Kavanaugh?

Such threatening, banana republic rhetoric is obviously having an effect: a shocking new poll commissioned by the SPLC found that 44% of male Democrats under 50 believe it’s acceptable to assassinate a politician “who is harming the country or our democracy.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/06/09/a-disturbing-poll-in-the-aftermath-of-the-attempted-assassination-of-brett-kavanaugh-n1604326

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, who tonight will try to convince Americans that Trump incited violent insurrection against a branch of the government by telling his supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically,” blocked an attempt by Republicans to get the House to pass an emergency bill to increase security for SCOTUS Justices - a bill already passed unanimously by the Senate.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/06/08/democrats-block-bill-providing-additional-security-for-supreme-court-justices/

So once again: which party is supposedly the party of violent, extremist threats to our democracy?

Biden on Kimmel

June 9, 2022

Last night, President Biden finally gave an interview for the first time in 120 days, but instead of a live press conference, it was a pre-taped chat with sycophantic late night host, Jimmy Kimmel. As expected, it was like Biden's previous visit with fellow ABC host George Stephanopoulos: a softball session with a DNC mouthpiece who isn’t as funny as he used to be.

Kimmel completely ignored the assassination attempt on Justice Kavanaugh and brushed off inflation, the #1 concern of most Americans according to the latest polling (Biden seemed to think he’s created the greatest economy ever and Americans just haven’t realized it.) Kimmel let Biden bash Trump and Republicans while claiming that people are always asking him why he “plays square” with Republicans when they don’t do it with him (Who are these people telling Biden that he’s being too bipartisan and conciliatory with the people he brands as the most dangerous extremists in America and who want children to die from gun violence? I’d like some names, please.)

He claimed he won’t issue a lot of executive orders because “I don’t want to emulate Trump’s abuse of the Constitution and constitutional authority.” Again, please explain how Trump abused his Constitutional authority. Almost all of his executive orders, even ones that were clearly within his powers, were held up by activist judges, after which Trump followed the appeals process. Biden has issued a flurry of executive orders that have decimated border security, the domestic fuel industry and Constitutional rights, and we’re lucky if he pays any attention at all when judges put stays on them. In that way, he's like the king of ruling-by-executive-order, his old boss, Barack Obama.

One could easily argue, especially today, that the Democrats have shown nothing but contempt for the Judicial branch and have openly encouraged threats of violence against judges.

If you have the interest and a strong stomach, here’s a write-up of the interview…

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-jimmy-kimmel-network-late-night-interview

And full video of what Fox News’ Joe Concha said wasn’t even tough enough to be a softball interview, it was more like T-ball for kindergartners.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/jimmy-kimmel-biden-interview-tee-ball-concha

Or if you’d like to get the gist of it, including some of the worst moments that the media will gloss over, try these write-ups from Bonchie and Nick Arama at Redstate.com, listing the many delusional moments.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/06/09/bidens-senility-takes-center-stage-on-jimmy-kimmel-his-political-excuse-making-was-worse-n576579

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/06/09/biden-rants-against-republicans-scotus-as-he-descends-into-delusion-with-kimmel-n576528

Hey, America! Get ready for the “The January 6 Propaganda Machine Good-Time Show” starring...Nancy Pelosi...(CUE APPLAUSE)...and co-starring her special hand-picked friends, the Good-Time January 6 Committee members...(APPLAUSE)... ready to entertain you by dancing, side-stepping, and sometimes tiptoeing around what really happened on January 6! Produced by ABC, or at least by former ABC producers who shill for the Democrats and try their best to make them interesting! Brought to you, in a round-about way, by Mark Zuckerberg...Perkins Coie, Attorneys-at-Law...and Dominion Voting Systems! It’s the biggest event of the pre-election season! In primetime starting Thursday; check local listings!

Of course, this show will seem a lot like a re-run of Trump’s second impeachment, which was likewise a major video production brought to you by House Democrats. For the REAL show, the one that offers you facts that most people will not have heard before, check out the rebuttal by House Republicans --- the actual Republicans who weren’t allowed on Nancy’s bogus committee.

In breaking news late Tuesday, John Solomon offered a preview of at least one facet of the GOP rebuttal, after obtaining a secret Capitol Police “after-action report” that identified ‘sweeping blunders” regarding security on January 6. This is the difficult subject that Nancy’s committee should talk about in their hearings but won’t, as they’re too busy speculating about what was going through President Trump’s mind and trying to make him and his supporters look like insurrectionists, even though they aren’t.

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/internal-capitol-police-review-found-sweeping-intelligence-security-failures

This just-emerged, year-old report identifies 53 (!) areas of failure needing corrective action, ranging from “delayed deployment of specialized disturbance units” to “the fateful dismantling of an intelligence unit that monitored social media for threats.” Solomon says it “produces a far more stark portrait of leadership failure than those offered by Democrat-led investigations, making abundantly clear that the Capitol police under Nancy Pelosi were ill-equipped to defend one of America’s most symbolic and high-value institutions two decades after the Sept. 11 attacks.”

Here’s the full report:

https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2022-06/USCP-Jan6AfterActionReportandRecommendations6-4-21.pdf

“...The internal after-action report was constructed from observations from 44 different submissions from frontline Capitol Police commanders and officers to its Coordination Unit,” Solomon writes, “providing a specificity of failings and an unvarnished assessment of the senior leadership and its grasp on command and control during the crisis on January 6.” He said that many of those who requested to see the report, including Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, were not provided with a copy.

These submissions came directly from the front lines that day and support the view that “the Capitol was not protected in a proactive way,” said a senior law enforcement official who would only speak to Solomon about this report on condition of anonymity.

Former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik reviewed the report and said it “pointed to failure at the highest level of Capitol security,” adding that legislators showed no interest in actually investigating the security failures he saw that day. The only way this is really going to be investigated, he said, is if Congress gains new leadership after the November elections. “You know, somebody’s got to look at this,” he said. “The next House is going to have to do that.” In the meantime, the Democrats get to put on their show.

Kerik was adamant about current leaders’ negligence, saying, “You mean to tell me that nobody, nobody made any preemptive plans on how they were going to deal with any protest, any crowd, any large gathering around the Capitol for their quick reaction force...that’s crazy.”

He was interviewed by the January 6 committee, and I’d like to think he lit into them this way. it’s hard to believe they could slip up this badly without deliberately trying to leave the Capitol vulnerable. Ironically, the one person who really seemed to be on top of this was President Trump, when he offered up to 20,000 National Guard troops.

Besides having poorly designed equipment and delayed access to it –- it was locked on a bus and nobody had the key –- officials did not receive adequate training and preparation for such an event, the report said. “There were not enough hard platoons for the day.” Civil Disturbance Units (CDU) of the Capitol Police had been taken off their duty to cover other assignments, it said, “leaving an inadequate number to respond to the riot.”

You know, that’s when it would have been good to have those NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS.

Oh, but there was much more. As Solomon writes, “The report found that even the basics of physical security –- like secure elevators and locked doors –- were failures in a Capitol building long feared to be a target of terrorists and violent political extremists.”

Pelosi’s committee won’t be looking for answers about what went wrong with security; that’s not what it’s for. (And if they’ve even read the secret report, they haven’t acted on it, as we’ve learned the CDU has still not revised its readiness plan.) In fact, Nancy’s role in what happened will be “off limits” during the hearings, as the committee chair, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, has said.

Solomon appeared, along with Kash Patel, on Tuesday’s HANNITY TV show to discuss the report. He said there were opportunities to address it during earlier security hearings about January 6 but that never happened. To do so would be to reveal that the “Mayor of the Capitol,” Nancy Pelosi, failed in her responsibility to secure Capitol Hill.

He cited as the most important thing the failure of the leadership of the Capitol Police Department to react to the FBI’s warning that there might be violence. They should have filtered down such active threat information to their commanders and officers. This was “a glaring omission,” he said.

When Hannity asked him about reports that the Capitol Hill Police chief had requested (at least six times!) that National Guard troops be called up, Solomon said that is “irrefutable.” This report doesn’t confirm it but he’s seen it in other documents. He said that over the next few weeks, he’ll be releasing about 10,000 pages.

“The basics of security went out the window,” he said, “and it’s because of their leadership. They have political leaders, not security leaders.”

Patel, who has testified before Nancy’s committee, reiterated what we reported yesterday: that he, Mark Meadows, and former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller were in a January 4 meeting in the Oval Office with Trump and all witnessed his offer of up to 20,000 National Guard troops for the event. Gen. Mark Milley has also attested to this. And there’s documentation, in the form of a “delegation memo” to the Secretary of the Army, who is then supposed to be ready for the Speaker’s request. Pelosi never requested them. And DC Mayor Muriel Bowser was clear that she did not want them, either. Patel once again stressed that all documentation relating to January 6 needs to be made public.

As you know, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik will host the rebuttal --- the REAL story. She also asks important questions, such as “Who placed a bomb outside the headquarters of the Republican National Committee?” “Why was the U.S. Capitol Police left so ill-prepared?”

Why indeed?

https://dailycaller.com/2022/06/07/opinion-the-greatest-distraction-on-earth-is-about-to-begin-brought-to-you-by-nancy-pelosi-stefanik/

In more late-breaking news, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, says whistleblowers within the FBI have told him the Bureau is retaliating against staffers who hold conservative views. They are reportedly purging their ranks of conservatives, particularly those who question their January 6 narrative.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/fbi-purging-conservatives-critics-january-6-narrative-whistleblowers-tell-gop-lawmaker

According to Jordan, a decorated Iraq war veteran was “being run out of the FBI” for daring to say something “that offended the FBI leadership about the January 6 investigation.” For disagreeing, he was indefinitely suspended without pay.

Another FBI official is being treated the same way because of an answer that person gave on an anonymous questionnaire to a question about January 6. It was something the leadership disagreed with, so that apparently is a career-ender.

Jordan says half a dozen from the FBI have come to his committee to tell their stories. Others have had their security clearances revoked after simply attending the Capitol Hill rally, even though they were far from the Capitol building and had nothing to do with the protest. Attending a Trump rally was enough.

As for the televised hearings, he said this was the only congressional committee hearing he’d ever seen in which there was no opportunity to cross-examine witnesses. “Because there’s no Republican on that committee who will do it,” he said. He explained that even when Adam Schiff had his private impeachment “bunker,” Jordan, as a member of the committee, could still be in that room and ask questions. But for this committee, Nancy Pelosi hand-picked every member, including the two anti-Trump “Republicans” --- that’s what makes it illegitimate --- and they can be counted on NOT to ask the questions that need to be asked.

Again, to hear anyone even dare to ask those questions, we’ll need to go over and listen to Elise Stefanik’s rebuttal. See you there.

THE EVENING EDITION

BY MIKE HUCKABEE

Good evening! Blessings on you and your family and from all the Huckabee staff! Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.

|READ AD-FREE ON SUBSTACK | SUBSCRIBE | CONTACT ME


New Court Ruling, but not the one you are waiting for


The Supreme Court is really dragging out the wait for a ruling possibly overturning Roe v. Wade. The Court released one decision Wednesday, but it was on an obscure case called Egbert v. Boule. While we continue to wait, you can read about that case here:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/06/08/supreme-court-rules-against-man-who-sued-federal-customs-police-use-force-bivins-smugglers-inn/7393307001/


DAILY BIBLE VERSE

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

John 16:33

If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in one of our newsletters, please email [email protected].


Timely Reminder


A timely reminder to President Biden and other Democrats clamoring for more gun laws and gun confiscation: a major group that you’re talking about disarming is Black Americans who have been buying more guns recently to protect their families from the wave of violent crime set off by your leftist, pro-criminal policies and defunding of police. So why do you racists want to leave law-abiding Black Americans at the mercy of violent criminals?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-black-americans-are-buying-more-guns-ownership-laws-crime-violence-protection-11654635686

Here’s more on a growing demographic that Democrat gun control advocates want to pretend doesn’t exist: Black women gun owners. In short, the people who most need protection from the deadly consequences of Democrat policies in blue urban areas.

https://redstate.com/jenniferoo/2022/06/07/dont-tread-on-me-has-become-the-gun-toting-black-womans-credo-n575718


Keeping up with politics can be a real downer


When you have to keep up with politics for a living, it can really get you down. That’s why I suggest that people let us read the news so you won’t have to. We’ll give you the stuff worth knowing and tell it to you straight so you can be informed then go do more pleasant things.

For instance, it’s easy to get depressed when you have to listen every day to the gaggle of dunces that comprise the Biden Administration. It’s a place where the President refuses to take questions from reporters but will finally sit down tonight for his first Q&A in months…with late night “comedian” and DNC mouthpiece Jimmy Kimmel. Comic Jimmy Failla said it was likely to be about as hard-hitting as a bouncy castle. We should get combat pay for having to watch both Biden and Kimmel at the same time so you don’t have to.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/jimmy-kimmels-history-partisan-rhetoric-republicans-perfect-host-biden-interview

Then there are the incessant inanities of Vice President Kamala Harris, and the utterly clueless comments of Biden’s Cabinet officials, from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen (who just didn’t see inflation coming, but now helpfully says, “I very much hope it will be coming down”) to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who said of high gas prices, “The reality is that there isn’t very much more to be done.”

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/06/08/sen-kennedy-perfectly-punctures-the-biden-team-for-giving-up-on-inflation-and-gas-prices-n576062

Well, maybe aside from the President calling off his war to destroy the domestic fuel industry and letting Americans pump and refine oil, and build pipelines and nuclear power plants. But that’s crazy talk! We just need a billion more windmills.

Still, even while being forced to keep up with this Category 5 storm of stupidity, there are a few bright spots. One of them is hearing what Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy has to say about it all. Here are a few choice recent quotes, and there are more at that last link:

“The price of gas is so high that it would be cheaper to buy cocaine and just run everywhere.”

As for how Biden can solve all these baffling problems: “Do what we were doing the day before you took office.”

Kennedy said, “The American people understand that,” and that’s why Biden “is about as popular right now as a sinkhole.”


Yet Another Reason Why We Put “Fact Checkers” In Quotes


In a new undercover expose video, Project Veritas caught CBS Documentary Associate Michael Mulford saying that he wants to leave journalism because it’s not as impartial as it was and corporate media prioritizes “money over values” and “money reigns supreme.”

https://www.independentsentinel.com/cbs-reporter-its-money-over-morals-cheap-fact-checking/

For instance, he says they engage in cheap fact-checking: “I’ll just Google like, whatever, and then like, ‘CBS’ on the end, and if there’s a CBS article about it, then I’m like, ‘Great, [news report] verified.’”

To state that more clearly, he’s saying that CBS “fact-checks” a story by Googling to see if CBS has run a previous story on the same subject, and if so, it’s considered fact-checked. Their fact-checking authority is themselves.

And you thought only the parents of young children could get away with saying, “It's so because I said so!”


“Lightyear”


Apparently, Disney thinks it hasn’t done enough to drive away parents with inappropriate LGBTQ+++ messaging in children’s entertainment. So here’s what you’ll see if you take your kids to their next big movie, "Lightyear."

https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/07/disney-doubles-down-on-lgbtq-programming-with-lightyear-and-more/

Remember when Disney used to be considered the only reliably safe choice for wholesome family entertainment? That sure seems like a long time ago.

That article also quotes anonymous Disney employees complaining that the company’s new diversity and inclusion initiative “Reimagine Tomorrow” doesn’t seem to have much room for including Christians or conservatives. They should try reimagining tomorrow in their theme parks as a day when there are no Christian or conservative paying customers.


Bulletin: Armed man arrested outside of Kavanaugh home


Wednesday morning, police arrested a California man outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house. Early reports were that he was carrying a gun and a knife and burglary tools, and that he said he wanted to kill Kavanaugh because he was angry about the leak indicating Roe v. Wade would be overturned.

https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2022/06/08/breaking-police-capture-armed-man-near-kavanaugh-home-n474871

As you can see at the link, Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Joy Reid who have spewed irresponsible rhetoric threatening the Justices are being remarkably quiet, while the “Ruth Sent Us” group that was doxing conservative Justices and protesting illegally outside their homes tried to deflect blame, but not very successfully.

Mitch McConnell called on the House to pass a measure to provide more security to SCOTUS Justices that already passed the Senate but was inexplicably blocked by House Democrats. Some are also urging McConnell to discourage this kind of thuggery by announcing that Republicans will block any SCOTUS nominations for openings created by assassination until after the swearing-in of the next President. This is a breaking story, so we’ll have more details as they become available. But I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting on Democrats to apologize for clearly inciting violent insurrection against a branch of our democracy.

Meanwhile, law professor Josh Blackman has a suggestion for the SCOTUS: stop dragging out the release of the decision on Roe v. Wade and get it over with. We don’t need any more time for leftists to work themselves up into homicidal frenzies or for Chief Justice Roberts to lobby conservatives to vote with the liberals and keep a bad court ruling on life support.

https://reason.com/volokh/2022/06/08/so-long-as-dobbs-remains-undecided-the-lives-of-the-justices-are-at-risk/

And thanks to Instapundit for this round-up of reminders about which Party really is the most dangerous group of extremists around today.

https://instapundit.com/524615/


I JUST WANTED TO SAY: 

Thank you for reading my newsletter. 

For more news, visit my website.


Yesterday, we brought you the disgusting story of what was done to Trump economic and trade adviser Peter Navarro, leading into the week on which Democrats are pinning all their hopes and unrealistic dreams of holding back Republicans this fall: the hearings into January 6 being held by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sham committee. If you do force yourself to watch any of that --- remember, “we watch the news, so you don’t have to" --- a lot of it will look familiar.

Who could forget the second impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, the one that took place when he was already headed out the door? The House impeachment managers went all-out, featuring a professionally produced video that heightened the drama of January 6 and exaggerated the violent “insurrection” that was going to destroy our democracy and take our country down by force! Never mind that it was really just a small group of desperately concerned but tragically misguided people who wanted the final vote to be checked out before the election was certified, and that there was not even ONE GUN among them. Some insurrection.

For the impeachment, video production was done not by a movie company, as was widely reported at the time, but by a firm called DOAR, which specializes in trial strategies, including "crafting visual presentations that aim to persuade juries."

https://news.yahoo.com/heres-made-chilling-video-montage-235331762.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

I condemned the behavior on January 6 at the time and repeatedly thereafter, but I do understand that protesters were reacting to a hard truth: that no one in the Judicial Branch was listening to them. Remember, the only person killed in violence that day was an unarmed woman, and her death was at the hand of Capitol Hill security. (As we learned later, another unarmed woman who died may also have been killed by police, beaten as she lay on the ground, trampled.)

Anyway, this time, Pelosi’s hearings, to be held in primetime starting Thursday, will be “produced” by former ABC News president James Goldston, producer for “Good Morning, America,” “Nightline” and “20/20.” His contribution to the Democrats is described as “an upcoming primetime multimedia presentation that has been likened to a high-quality investigative documentary special.”

FOX News reports that Goldston has actually joined the committee as a “soon-to-be announced advisor.” His video is the first in a series “designed to engage the American people and journalists” who had tuned out of the issue. With the country in chaos on virtually every front, Democrats are desperate to brainwash voters into not voting for Republicans no matter how bad it gets.

So expect this “series” to continue till Election Day, cranked out by the big Democrat propaganda machine.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/abc-news-president-jan-6-commitee-primetime

They’ve also enlisted the help of former ABC producer Amy Robach, who’s best known for saying on a hot mic that her network had spiked her Jeffrey Epstein interview and quashed the story for three years. It seems appropriate that Nancy’s committee has hired people with experience in spiking stories; get ready for the real story of January 6 to be similarly suppressed.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/abc-amy-robach-jeffrey-epstein-hot-mic

What you definitely should watch is the rebuttal by Republicans led by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. It will tell what Nancy’s committee hearings will not: that on January 4, President Trump himself, in front of multiple witnesses (former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, his chief of staff Kash Patel, and Gen. Mark Milley) in the Oval Office, BROUGHT UP the subject of offering Pelosi --- who as Speaker of the House is in charge of Capitol Hill security --- up to 20,000 National Guard troops for security during his rally, and that she, along with Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Department of Defense, denied his offer.

According to Patel, there is ample documentation of all of this, which the January 6 committee should have but will likely not make a part of their primetime production. He says that what this committee really should do is release all documents and transcripts they have relative to January 6, showing that they acted appropriately, “and that the President’s authorization was unequivocal.”

“I can say definitively,” Miller told Hannity, “President Trump offered any and all support requested by suitable officials within Washington DC...federal and local.” He went on to say that the U.S. military, with 10,000 police officers scheduled for duty in DC that day, had said they could handle UP TO A MILLION DEMONSTRATORS without enlisting additional security. If that sounds crazy to you, it does to us, too. Think Nancy’s committee will address this at all?

Shockingly, Mayor Bowser actively discouraged “additional deployment,” as in this letter from a recent inspector general’s report (which, believe it or not, found preparations for the event “appropriate”): “To be clear, the District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment without immediate notification to, and consultation with, MPD [Metro Police Department] if such plans are underway.”

Why not utilize more security if it is available? Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Gosh, you’d think Democrats were deliberately paving the way for the event to get out of control. Nah, surely that couldn't be.

As for Navarro, he was not at the Capitol on January 6 and did not encourage anyone to breach security. He ended up in handcuffs and shackles, sitting in a cell that once held would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley, only because he wouldn’t violate President Trump’s executive privilege for Nancy’s committee. (And he'd told them he would have turned himself in; FBI headquarters is an easy walk from his next-door apartment.) The committee wants to know every detail of Trump’s private conversations, so they can go after him just for discussing the constitutionality of various courses of action. Not for carrying them out --- because he didn’t, of course –- but for TALKING about them with his advisers. Talking about them is not a crime. But this is all they have to try to keep him from running for President again.

Recall that a decade ago, Obama Attorney General Eric Holder was found in criminal contempt of Congress for citing executive privilege in refusing to comply with a subpoena relating to the “Fast and Furious” scandal that armed Mexican drug dealers and led to Border Patrol officer Brian Terry's murder. This charge had overwhelming, bipartisan support. NOTHING happened to Holder.

Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue Monday about the double standard of 'justice' featured a montage of media hacks trashing Navarro for his non-compliance. “This prosecution is really about punishing Navarro based on his blatant disrespect for the congressional subpoena,” said one typical idiot on MSNBC. Ah, so this is really about respect! Hey, if it’s illegal to blatantly disrespect this illegitimate committee or any of its work product, I guess we should be counting the minutes till the FBI breaks down our door and places us in handcuffs. It has given us no reason to grant it the slightest respect.

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6307392441112#sp=show-clips

Good news

June 7, 2022

Good news: Congress is finally doing something to prevent a fertilizer shortage. They’re giving Adam Schiff a microphone.

Schiff is famous for producing more horse manure than the Kentucky Derby, and he’ll get another chance to demonstrate that skill on Thursday, when Democrats desperate for anything to save their seats will hold a prime time session of their illegitimate January 6th Committee (I call it “illegitimate” because it is: its founding legislation required it to contain Republicans chosen by the House GOP leader; Nancy Pelosi rejected his choices and appointed her own, so it’s in violation of its own charter, its subpoenas should carry no weight; and it should be immediately disbanded.)

Democrats have abused their powers horrendously in trying to destroy their political opponents and innocent Trump supporters, and overcharged and persecuted even people who might actually be guilty of something. They’ve also spent a year and half bloviating about what a huge threat to “our democracy” that three-hour riot was (it was deplorable, but actually pretty short and relatively non-violent compared to the Democrats’ own “peaceful” riots.) They’ve tried to convince us it was the end of the world, like a toddler screaming that she’s going to DIIIIIIE from a paper cut.

I don’t know who they think will actually watch this primetime dog and donkey show, since most Americans have real problems of the Democrats’ own making to deal with and are way past caring about January 6th. Like a TV series on its last legs that tries to rekindle interest by throwing in a wild new plot twist, Schiff is claiming to have a “great deal of new evidence” to show how close we came to “losing our democracy.” Quick, spread that on a wheat field!

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2022/06/05/adam-schiff-claims-a-great-deal-of-new-evidence-exists-in-capitol-probe-n575181 

Does anyone seriously believe that a brag-tag mob was going to overthrow the federal government, or that Trump would have led a violent insurrection? Does anyone believe that Adam Schiff has any “new evidence?” If he did, he would’ve leaked it by now, since lying and leaking are his only two legislative talents. And where has this so-called “evidence” been all this time? In the same coat pocket with all that evidence he claimed to have of Trump officials colluding with Russia?

Or is this the kind of “new evidence” he’s talking about?

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/06/04/anonymous-gets-dropped-by-secret-service-after-spreading-january-6th-claim-n574848

It’s another fake news claim that the Secret Service feared Trump was about to turn against Vice President Pence and put him in physical danger. Notice how many of these accusations are about things they “feared Trump was going to do” that he never actually did? Even the head of the Secret Service under Biden shot down this latest imaginary tale, saying no threat against Pence was ever communicated to the Secret Service.  

The Republicans are planning a rapid response to all the Democrats’ ridiculous claims, but I question whether anyone will even be watching this garbage, other than CNN and MSNBC hosts and, unfortunately, me. The Democrats could better spend their time trying to fix some of the problems they’ve caused, but they either don’t know how or can’t admit that the damage was deliberate. Going whole hog on abusing their power to punish their political opponents is as dumb and short-sighted a move as killing the filibuster. As law Professor Jonathan Turley writes, they may soon be headed for a long stretch in the minority, and if Republicans follow the precedent they’ve set, it’s going to be a very uncomfortable stretch indeed.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/06/04/jonathan-turley-dems-may-be-ensuring-their-own-destruction-with-latest-moves-by-jan-6-cmte-n574748

Personally, I can’t wait to see what the Republican Committee to Investigate the Democrats’ January 6th Committee turns up.

 

Hopeful signs

June 7, 2022

Here are a couple more hopeful signs that the tyranny of the Rainbow Mafia may finally be coming to an end as people stand up and say, “Enough.” First, the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team held a “Pride Month” weekend celebration of the LGBTQ community, and several players refused to wear the rainbow logo on their uniforms because it violated their Christian religious beliefs. Before they’re falsely accused of “hatred,” relief pitcher Jason Adam said, “It’s just what we believe the lifestyle he’s (Jesus) encouraged us to live for our good, not to withhold. But we love these men and women, we care about them and we want them to feel safe and welcome here.”

https://justthenews.com/nation/culture/several-tampa-bay-rays-decline-wear-lgbtq-logos-religious-reasons

And 70 churches in Georgia have officially split from the United Methodist Church, largely because of church leaders prioritizing LGBTQ activism over the Bible. Like the quote above, they don’t see how loving the sinner requires them to approve of and celebrate the sin.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/georgia-churches-split-united-methodist-church-lgbtq

I keep hearing about how church attendance is falling in America, and it’s usually spun as being people rejecting God or the Bible. But from the comments on that second story from people who claim to have attended Methodist churches in recent years, there seems to be near unanimous agreement that it’s the church that left them. There are many complaints that their churches became more like social centers or coffee houses, and ministers were more focused on pushing current social issues than preaching the Bible. One commenter said until he switched to a Baptist-based church, he’d never ever heard much about the New Testament or anything about redemption through Christ.

People are still looking for God and the message of Jesus Christ. If they aren’t finding that in a particular church, then there are plenty of others where it’s readily available for free.

Abuse of Power

June 6, 2022

By now, you might have heard about the scurrilous abuse of power by Nancy Pelosi’s illegitimate January 6th Kangaroo Kommittee (Is my verbiage too subtle for you to tell what I think of them?) in having former Trump adviser Peter Navarro arrested for contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate. Frankly, I think contempt is the only rational reaction to this star chamber.

Navarro was on his way to tape an interview on my TBN show when the feds played their role as Pelosi’s personal Stasi. Here is more on the story, followed by my statement on this unconscionable and un-American action.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/03/former-trump-aide-peter-navarro-indicted-for-contempt-of-congress-in-defying-jan-6-capitol-probe-subpoena.html

The outrageous treatment of Peter Navarro is another example of a federal police agency gone mad. Navarro was actually boarding a plane in DC to come to Nashville to be the primary guest on my show this weekend when he was handcuffed and whisked to a DC jail, put in leg shackles and held until his appearance before a magistrate.

He had spoken to the FBI Wednesday and told them if they were going to charge him to call him and he would turn himself in. Navarro literally lives in an apartment NEXT DOOR TO THE FBI! But they had to “make a spectacle” and publicly humiliate a 72-year-old man who has faithfully served his country.

And the “TRUMPED up” charge (emphasis mine) was because he genuinely believes (as I do!) that Nancy Pelosi’s sham committee failed to meet its own rules for how it was to be constituted, but most importantly involves the very serious Constitutional issue of separation of powers in which a partisan, hate-filled gang of House Democrats are demanding that the Executive Branch give over internal documents, notes and other confidential papers from the White House. This is an issue of grave violation of Executive Privilege and should be settled by the Supreme Court.

This entire episode is another example of how the powers of Washington, the Democrat mafia, and the media colluded not only to destroy a man’s reputation and life, but how they have been active partners in shredding the Constitution. These are the REAL insurrectionists!


Today marks the 78th anniversary of D-Day, the biggest seaborne invasion in history and likely the most complex military operation of all time. Somehow, a massive invasion involving over 300,000 troops was kept secret until the moment it began on the beaches of Normandy. (Leakers were not considered heroes back then, thank God.)

Of the Allied troops who stormed the beaches or parachuted behind enemy lines, thousands were killed or injured by relentless gunfire from the entrenched German snipers’ positions. But they fought on and eventually prevailed, gaining a foothold in France and marking the turning of the tide of World War II in Europe.

Here's a good primer on how the D-Day invasion was planned and carried out, and the aftermath.

https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/remembering-d-day-what-happened-during-wwii-normandy-invasion

This is a report on the commemoration of D-Day in France, and how, with COVID lockdowns finally behind us, veterans in their 90s were once again able to return to be honored and to honor their fallen comrades.

https://www.fox8live.com/2022/06/06/crowds-honor-wwii-veterans-normandy-d-day-celebrations/

And some historic photos from D-Day…

https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/pictures-look-back-d-day

Sadly, many young Americans are in danger of forgetting the incredible heroism of the troops who landed on D-Day and what they did to end the threat of Nazism because they’re not being taught accurate American history. It’s hard to push a narrative about America being evil when you have to tell students how many Americans sacrificed their lives and limbs to save people they’d never met on the other side of the world.

The anniversary of D-Day is a reminder of what true courage really is. It’s doing the right thing, even when it requires charging head-on into the face of death. D-Day veterans often shun the title of “hero,” but nobody is more deserving of it. And nobody is more deserving of being remembered and honored long after their lives are over, and long after all of our lives are over.

To learn more about D-Day, and even more importantly, to help teach your children about it, here’s a link to the website of the National D-Day Memorial. You can also watch today’s commemorative event on video there:

https://www.dday.org/

Note to anyone wishing to censor, suppress, demonetize or otherwise interfere with the dissemination of this story: It makes no claim that any vulnerabilities of electronic voting systems were used to change the outcome of the 2020 election. (That’s a separate issue.) But a highly anticipated report by CISA --- the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – has provided official documentation of the major security flaws posed by Dominion Voting Machines.

https://beckernews.com/highly-anticipated-cisa-report-on-dominion-voting-machines-proves-most-secure-election-in-history-was-a-lie-45236/

As Kyle Becker reports, the CISA findings were issued based on the analysis of J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan and Drew Springall of Auburn University.

Their overview lists nine different security concerns. These vulnerabilities “justify the concerns of election observers who pointed out that admin rights could be used to override security features and that the system could potentially be hijacked due to “spoofing.”

The vulnerabilities of the versions of Dominion’s ImageCastX software they were able to test could allow someone to disguise malicious applications on a device, gain elevated privileges and/or install malicious code, and perform arbitrary administrative actions. It gets worse: An attacker could also gain access to sensitive information and perform privileged actions to potentially affect other election equipment (!). Also, the “authentication mechanism” is susceptible to forgery, allowing an attacker to print an arbitrary number of ballots without authorization.

I’ll put it in layman’s terms. This system is a hot mess. And these are the same potential problems that some cyber experts have been trying to discuss for a year and a half.

CISA has a long, loooong list of recommendations for increasing the level of security in future elections. This list is so exhaustive that it’s hard to imagine all of them ever being followed. So, hey --- I have a great idea! Let’s scrap electronic voting systems entirely and go back to physical paper ballots with no connection to the internet, in-person voting except for very specific reasons, photo ID and poll watchers everywhere. That’s the only way we’re ever going to have faith in our elections now.

Importantly --- though the report itself doesn’t get into how the 2020 presidential election might have been affected --- Becker notes that “a number of these mitigation measures were not followed” at that time. These include:

--- ensuring physical security of machines and equipment (there were lost flash drives)

--- broken chain-of-custody procedures (don’t get us started about the drop boxes)

--- machines proven to have been connected to the internet

--- missing or destroyed ballot images

--- using QR codes instead of printouts that can be read by an actual person

Early on, CISA told us, “We can assure you we have utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should, too.” But, as Becker observes, “...CISA’s infamous claim that the 2020 election was ‘most secure in American history’ is clearly disproven by its own report two years after the fact.”

Ever since the election, voters who expressed any concern at all about election security and integrity were condemned for “destroying faith in our democracy.” Why, we were just conspiracy theorists, upset that the election didn’t turn out the way we wanted. But now, after all this time, we find that we were right to be concerned. And the machines themselves were just one facet of that extremely flawed stone that was the 2020 election.

How I wish this "official" vindication made me feel better. But with it coming so late, and knowing how little acknowledgment it will receive, I still feel a little sick.

Take a look at how it's being reported: CBS News twisted the headline to read, "U.S. finds no evidence flaws in Dominion voting machines were ever EXPLOITED." (Emphasis mine.) According to Becker, we don't know how hard they were even looking for that. "CISA can claim that it has no evidence of voting machines being exploited," Becker writes, "but voters are left to wonder if that is because they didn't seriously look."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dominion-voting-machines-2020-election-cisa/

After a very long count of a very close vote, David McCormick conceded to Dr. Mehmet Oz in the Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary race and pledged his support.

https://redstate.com/carcand/2022/06/03/breaking-david-mccormick-concedes-to-dr-mehmet-oz-in-pennsylvania-senate-primary-n574593

Oz will face Democrat candidate and current state Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, who made news of his own. Questions have been swirling about whether Fetterman was hiding health problems after he suffered a small stroke and still isn’t back on the campaign trail. This week, he released a letter from a doctor claiming that he has heart problems and a pacemaker/defibrillator. But he’s stable and if he follows doctors’ advice (which he admits he ignored for five years, but claims he's learned his lesson), he should be okay. But since it’s not from his regular doctors but one who, until this week, hadn’t seen him since 2017, it’s raising even more concerns.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/06/03/dem-senate-candidate-john-fetterman-releases-a-doozy-of-a-letter-from-his-doctor-n574430

Meanwhile, Twitchy.com noted that this will be a Senate race between a retired heart surgeon and a guy who’s off the campaign trail due to a heart problem. At least if any emergencies occur during the debates, there’ll be a heart doctor in the house.

In other political developments, New York Republican Rep. Chris Jacobs announced that he will not run for reelection because of all the angry blowback he’s getting from Republicans and conservatives for joining with Democrats to support a federal “assault weapons” ban.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-rep-chris-jacobs-announces-retirement-gun-control

And in Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District, Trump-backed GOP House candidate Robby Starbuck won his legal challenge against the state Republican Executive Committee, which voted to remove him, Morgan Ortegus and Baxter Lee from the ballot over alleged eligibility issues. Starbuck did provide alternative proof that he was eligible to run, and the court ruled that the committee violated the state’s open meetings law with its sudden, secretive vote to remove the candidates. There’s more at the link, but it’s not clear if Ortegus and Lee will try to get back in the race, since they were removed from the ballot at the same illegal meeting.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/national-gas-prices-double-since-biden-took-office

Even some who don’t call themselves conservatives were taken aback by the treatment of former Trump economic and trade adviser Peter Navarro by Nancy Pelosi’s sham January 6 committee, which has charged him with contempt of Congress for not turning over materials and details of private conversations that President Trump maintains are privileged. Both Trump and Navarro also claim the committee isn’t even constitutional, as it violates the separation of powers. In addition, Pelosi hand-picked everyone on it, including the only two “Republicans” she allowed, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, both viciously anti-Trump.

As I’m sure you know, Navarro was arrested and handcuffed at the airport on Friday as he was about to board a flight to Nashville to appear on my TBN weekend show. This was done even though he‘d told them in writing on Wednesday he’d come in on his own if they asked. He also says he lives in an apartment that literally is next door to FBI headquarters, so he could've just walked over, or vice versa. Here’s what he had to say after his arrest, both the video and transcript. Peter has filed a civil suit against the committee.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/06/04/peter_navarro_speaks_after_indictment_arrest_for_contempt_january_6_kangaroo_committee_is_not_following_its_own_rules.html

Here’s what I had to say about it in this weekend’s opening monologue. (I also had a few words for the Michael Sussmann judge and jury.) I hope to have Peter on my show very soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAh7H5zlK8M

Bestselling author and DILBERT cartoonist Scott Adams is one of those who found this committee’s behavior extremely discomforting, and he is not a Republican. In his “Coffee With Scott Adams” podcast on Saturday, Episode 1764 on YouTube, he weighed in. Here’s the link to the entire podcast; below are highlights and our comments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85f3zN3nMdw

After describing the manner in which Navarro was arrested, Adams asked, “Do you think they did that to Sussmann? Did Sussmann have shackles; did he get arrested in public?” That question, of course, was rhetorical; not only did law enforcement deal with Sussmann professionally, but the FBI had always treated him like a buddy. Sussmann had his own FBI security badge, free to come and go at their headquarters. According to recent reports, he even occupied the FBI’s “secure work environment” at his law firm, Perkins Coie, with a portal to the FBI database --- a highly unusual arrangement.  He was that special!

“So I saw Peter Navarro talking about [his arrest],” Adams said, “after he got released, probably on bail, I guess, and [long pause]...did you see this? Can you tell me how this made you feel? Because, I felt something. And I didn’t like it at all. What happened to Roger Stone, I said to myself, ‘Well, this is a travesty, but it might also be a one-off. It’s not one-off. Apparently, there’s just a different standard for how the Trump supporters are being treated. This is so clear now...I mean, this is just shocking.”

He continued: “Now, Peter Navarro also has a new book out, called TAKING BACK TRUMP’S AMERICA, which as of this morning [Saturday] was #4 on Amazon. And I’ve been pumping it up, telling people to buy his book, ‘cause it’s how he’s gonna pay for his defense. I don’t know if he can even make enough money from the book, even if it’s a #1 bestseller, to pay for the defense, because the defense is pretty expensive, but I thought, ‘I don’t like where this went. I don’t like what my government did, and I would like to push a little power back in his direction.’”

He said that “as one small thing” he could do, he’s been tweeting support for Navarro’s book. “I’ve pre-ordered it,” he said, “and I’d recommend that you do the same. If it gets to #1, then his defense will be bolstered, both financially and in the public, and I think that that’s the appropriate way to handle this.”

Adams then went off on an interesting tangent, saying he can see why some might not support Trump, “because he was divisive," but explaining why he supported him in 2016: “I wanted him to break everything. ‘Cause everything needed to be broken...And in a large way, I got what I wanted. He did demolish everything...[chuckling] not without its cost. It’s not free to demolish stuff...But there wasn’t any chance they could keep working the way they were working. So we needed somebody strong enough to just break the system, and...I think he did that, in a number of ways.”

He said that thanks to Trump, “there are things that we think about differently, permanently now...so we understand ‘fake news,’” etc.

“But this Peter Navarro thing is almost like a Bat-call for Trump,” he said. (He’d also like to hear Ron DeSantis’ take on it.) “But if Peter Navarro ends up serving jail time or something, for this –- what appears to be hunting Republicans, you know, the whole January 6 witch-hunt sort of thing, which is not to say there weren’t bad people who need to be brought to justice; everybody understands… –- this feels as though it could happen to me. Like actually, literally me. Actually, I saw myself in chains.”

Adams is right to consider that possibility. It COULD happen to him, or you, or certainly to me. It’s a risk for anyone they see as effective in running counter to their rules and their message. I would add that those who, like him, have a history of leaning left are particularly at risk. These one-time leftists who have had epiphanies --- Brandon Straka of #WalkAway is a great example --- are well aware of the hatred directed at them now and how the legal system has been turned against them.

Here’s Straka on my show a few weeks ago, describing how he was treated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouesaYreJEU

As for Adams, he doesn’t “mind a good fight, so let’s bring that on.” He added later in the show that if Navarro goes to prison over this, he’ll likely support Trump, as it would show things still really need to be broken, “though there is a risk of him over-breaking it.” Adams thought DeSantis might also be able to do the necessary breaking but that he still needs to prove himself to be strongly pro-free speech.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appeared on SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES to explain what’s twisted about Pelosi’s committee and also to provide more details about Navarro’s arrest. Apparently, law enforcement followed him on his ride to the airport to arrest him there and “make a scene and to handcuff him.” He added that with their plan to hold prime-time public hearings, they’re showing themselves to be “a political committee going after their opponents and trying to raise money.”

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6307325831112#sp=show-clips

To end on a high note, the GOP is not taking this lying down, and they'll be running rapid-response programming during the Democrats’ kangaroo-court proceedings. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik is presiding, and she's guaranteed to shine. They’ll address what Nancy’s committee should investigate but won’t: how security at the Capitol Hill rally was completely botched, a disaster. Here are the details.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/06/04/exclusive-rep-elise-stefanik-gop-ready-to-provide-counter-programming-to-illegitimate-january-6-hearing/

We offered a theory after Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann walked last week that we now formally call The "Loss Leader" Theory. Just as a retail store might offer some product, such as a jug of milk, at below cost –- a “loss leader” –- to get customers into the store and buy more, so Special Counsel John Durham prosecuted a small case he knew he would lose in the DC courts, to introduce evidence suggestive of far greater misdeeds.

This appears to have been done with Michael Sussmann, even as he walked out of court free and clear on his charge of lying to the FBI. Emails included as part of his trial raise questions as to his role in something else involving the FBI; namely, shaping the narrative of the so-called “Russian hack” of the DNC and the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee). You know, the “hack” for which there is no evidence –- at least that the public has seen –- of it being a Russian hack, or even a hack at all.

THE EPOCH TIMES has obtained trial documents and, in a premium story, reports that “Sussmann proposed alterations to an FBI statement on the hacking of the [DCCC] to avoid undermining the narrative for his clients.” And the FBI bent to his will.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/fbi-altered-statement-on-intrusion-into-democrat-network-based-on-input-from-lawyer_4505749.html

In July 2016, Jim Trainor, assistant director for the FBI Cyber Division, wrote Sussmann, who was representing the DNC and DCCC, to get his “thoughts” on the FBI’s draft response to all the phone calls they were getting on the “Russia hack” story. Sussmann read the draft and wrote back:

“The draft you sent says only that the FBI is aware of media reports; it does not say that the FBI is aware of the INTRUSION [emphasis ours] that the DCCC reported. Indeed, it refers only to a “possible” cyber intrusion and in that way undermines what the DCCC said in its statement (or at least calls into question what the DCCC said).”

Trainer went right along with Sussmann’s proposed changes. Instead of saying the FBI is aware of reporting on “a possible cyber intrusion involving the DCCC,” it would say the Bureau “is aware of the cyber intrusion involving the DCCC that has been reported in the media and the FBI has been working to determine the nature and scope of the matter.”

To provide some context, one day before this email exchange between Sussmann and Trainor, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed President Obama that Russia was aware of a plan by Hillary to “vilify” her rival, Trump, by “stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” Days later, the CIA told the FBI they had intelligence showing Clinton’s plan was meant to distract the public from her own scandal, the use of a private email server for classified government business.

Recall that the DNC and DCCC hired the private cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to investigate the so-called “intrusions.” The FBI opened their own investigation, but they were relying on server images and reports produced by CrowdStrike and partially redacted. The Bureau requested the unredacted documents but never received them. According to another email produced at trial, Sussmann was the point person between the FBI and the DNC/DCCC.

Other emails between Sussmann and Trainor show Sussmann upset that the FBI had announced it was investigating. He requested the Bureau consult him before making public statements about it. A compliant Trainor apologized and agreed. He said the FBI and the “victims” (the alleged hack-ees) would be “equally cooperative partners as we navigate this matter.”

Note that in changing the words of Trainer’s draft, Sussmann was firming up his preferred narrative that this breach DID HAPPEN, not just that it possibly did. He wanted to have no question of this, even though the FBI had not concluded it on their own and would always simply take CrowdStrike’s word. Trainer’s original draft was really more accurate.

So we’ve established that Sussmann was the point man and storyteller for something that still remains a mystery, an event that appears to have set up the whole Russia Hoax. It seems to us that the truth about it might be one of those big-ticket items in the store; Sussmann’s doomed trial on one count of lying was just the jug of cheap milk that got us in there.

The House Judiciary Committee will hold an emergency meeting today to put together a bill that will reportedly include eight new gun control measures. It includes “proposals to raise the minimum age for purchasing a semi-automatic weapon from 18 to 21, ban ‘high capacity magazines,’ establish a registry for bump stocks and more.” True to form, it’s not called the “Gun Control Omnibus Act” but the “Protect Our Kids Act.” So when you hear that term, you’ll know what it actually is.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democrats-facing-tough-elections-sound-off-house-hearing-gun-control

Never let it be said that we don’t listen to all sides of an issue. Here’s an op-ed by Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, detailing what he says are some small changes that could be made to gun laws and increasing support for mental health that could help reduce gun violence and prevent school shootings and that members of both parties could agree on.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/uvalde-texas-school-shooting-gun-control

I invite you to read what he has to say and tell us in the comments whether you would be willing to compromise on such measures, whether you think they would help, and why or why not.

For more, here’s Derek Hunter of Townhall.com analyzing a New York Times editorial demanding more gun control and explaining the holes in their thinking.

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2022/05/31/democrats-blame-everything-but-those-responsible-n2607967

In his inimitable way, Kurt Schlichter explains that the problem isn’t a lack of gun laws, it’s a shortage of duty and accountability.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2022/06/02/time-to-reestablish-the-concepts-of-duty-and-accountability-n2608058

Finally, the uncle of one of the young victims of the Uvalde school shooting spoke out against people using their family’s name to promote more anti-gun laws. He said their own family are responsible gun owners, and they believe enhanced security at schools is a far better solution.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/uncle-uziyah-garcia-uvalde-shooting-gun-control

Don’t let anyone tell you that Special Counsel John Durham might as well pack it up after his loss in court Tuesday in the Sussmann case. That’s the mainstream media narrative –- at the conclusion of a trial they deliberately ignored –- and since when has a mainstream media narrative been true?

Former Attorney General Bill Barr appeared on “Jesse Watters Primetime” Wednesday night to comment on the Durham investigation in light of Michael Sussmann’s acquittal. Here’s the big take-away from that interview:

“No one’s more frustrated than the law enforcement people who are trying to uphold the law and trying to uphold one standard of the law –- and there’s not; there are two standards of the law, and we’ve had this struggle with that. And people have done, I think, a very good job trying to develop this case in the face of very strong headwinds. And part of this operation is to try to get the real story out. I’ve said from the beginning...if we can get convictions, if they’re achievable, then John Durham will achieve them. But...the other aspect of this is to get the story out, and I think the Danchenko prosecution [relative to the ‘dossier’] is gonna further amplify these themes and the role that the FBI leadership played in this, which is increasingly looking fishy and inexplicable.”

The prospect that the “dossier” was Russian disinformation fed through the Hillary campaign was “very real,” Barr said, and never looked into by special counsel Robert Mueller, Barr said, “even though he had all the relevant facts.”

Barr said he disagreed with Andrew McCarthy about the case being “lost or mismanaged” because of Durham painting the FBI as being ‘duped.’ (If you read what we said yesterday, you know we’re more in line with Barr than McCarthy on this.) “He didn’t. What I think he skillfully did,” Barr continued, “was focus on the clearest violation of the law that didn’t require him to prove even...[a] much more onerous case of the bad faith of the FBI at this stage. That would’ve been a Herculean case...[with a] high degree of difficulty compared to what he was doing.”

Durham didn’t say the FBI were ‘duped’ –- he “treated them as neutral, and let the facts speak for themselves,” Barr said. And the materiality of the lie told to the FBI, Barr thought, was clear. But this is a case that has to be built “painstakingly.” It would have been “a very hard case to prove, at this stage,” that the FBI “are bad guys,” he said. “Especially in front of a DC jury.”

NOTE that Barr has twice used the qualifier “at this stage,” implying that down the road, given what the investigation has revealed at that point, it might not be so hard to make the case.

“Complicated cases like this take a long time to build,” Barr concluded. “They occur step-by-step, and in secret. People don’t like that. But if they want people punished, that’s what it takes. If they want the facts of what happened, you can get it that much more quickly; you can give people immunity, and then require them to provide evidence. So, if you want the facts, if you want a report, that can be done fairly quickly. But if you want scalps, that takes time.”

If it’s true great minds think alike, I should congratulate the former attorney general for echoing essentially what we said here after the Sussmann verdict was read. The points to keep in mind are these:

– It’s true: there really are two systems of justice, and that is now painfully clear.

– Besides getting convictions if possible, Durham’s larger purpose is to get the full story out.

-- The next trial (Danchenko, involving the Steele “dossier”) will continue doing that.

-- The case did NOT hinge on the FBI being duped. Durham meant to let the facts show their behavior to be “fishy and inexplicable.” (In this courtroom, there would have been an acquittal either way.)

-- One big question to be answered is why the Mueller investigation tiptoed around known facts.

– The case Durham is building is very complicated and will take a long time.

– Durham is after big scalps. Don’t worry; this trial was just to sharpen the cleaver a little.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3509017-bill-barr-after-sussmann-acquittal-durham-did-an-exceptionally-able-job/

So, where does the investigation go from here? THE EPOCH TIMES has an excellent piece on that. (Writer Hans Mahncke does agree with McCarthy that Durham was pushing the “overarching” narrative that the FBI was duped; again, we saw that a bit differently.) Of course, there’s Danchenko and the “dossier” --- that trial is scheduled for October --- but there are other private actors such as the infamous Marc Elias, Fusion GPS co-founders Peter Fritsch and Glenn Simpson, and, of course, Rodney Joffe –- who was NOT granted immunity.

There was testimony in the Sussmann trial suggesting that Joffe had a role in analyzing the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC emails in May 2016. “If Joffe was involved in shaping the narrative of the alleged hacking,” Mahncke writes, “it would cast yet more doubt on the flimsy but prevailing conclusion that the Russian government was responsible.”

Let’s hope and pray that Durham is headed in that direction. It might even be the Holy Grail. The so-called “Russian hack” story laid the foundation for the whole Trump-Russia Hoax, yet there’s no evidence, at least that has been made public, that the DNC server was hacked by the Russians. The FBI accepted that explanation from the DNC without even examining their hard drive, which is in the possession of a company called CrowdStrike.

https://thescotfree.com/opinion/who-is-john-durham-targeting-next/

Mahncke points out that if Durham has more serious charges in mind for Joffe, he’s not hemmed in by the statute of limitations. For lying to the FBI, it’s only five years (and the allegations are from 2016), but for major fraud against the United States, it’s seven years.

Of course, there are also the “fishy” government actors such as the FBI’s Peter Strzok, Andy McCabe and Director James Comey. They seem like much slipperier fish to catch, but we now have evidence from this trial that the people on the 7th Floor were “fired up” about the Alfa Bank server and demanded a full investigation even though they had no credible evidence.

Jake Sullivan is another possible target. One fact, however, complicates Durham’s look at some government actors and shows how incestuous Washington DC is: Attorney General Merrick Garland’s counsel, Margaret Goodlander, is married to...Sullivan, who was helping spread the fake Alfa Bank narrative with Hillary and is now working in the Biden White House. For Durham, every day must feel like going to work in a mine field.

I often refer to modern so-called “anti-racist” efforts as the “racist anti-racist” movement. That’s not a partisan pejorative. I honestly believe that the left, under the guise of fighting racism, is actually attempting to divide Americans, foment hatred and suspicion of other races, and bring back the vile days of officially-enforced segregation and judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. Why do I think that? Because they just keep telling us over and over.

Here’s the latest example: Under the cloak of “equity,” some schools are now instituting race-based grading. The latest example is in Oak Park, Illinois, but as the linked story reports, it’s a growing trend that started in San Diego and like exotic diseases, wildfires and most awful leftist ideas, started spreading eastward from California.

https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2022/05/31/illinois-high-schools-implement-new-grading-practices-for-equity-n473102

The Illinois plan is typical of leftist policies in that it comes couched in fuzzy four-dollar words to hide its toxicity. It’s called “Transformative Education Professional Development and Grading.” It claims that “traditional grading practices perpetuate inequities and intensify the opportunity gap” through “outdated practices” and “unconscious biases” like letting “non-academic factors” such as student behavior and whether a student shows up to class interfere with teacher evaluation of students. Things like showing up late, misbehaving in class or handing in work late cannot reduce a student’s overall class grade.

While the Illinois plan doesn’t mention any particular race that this is supposed to benefit, it does condemn the traditional system it’s replacing as a “race-based grading system,” so it’s pretty clear what the insulting thinking is behind this. It used to be called “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” but now it’s called “equity.”

This should be abhorrent to people of all races. I do have to say, though, that I admire the one teacher quoted who was brave enough to question what this will do to students. She noted that she has a job where she’s expected to show up on time, do the work and behave professionally. This system will not prepare students for what they’re going to encounter when they leave school and join the real world.

But it is a truly “transformative” system if you want students to be so poorly prepared for the work world that they’re transformed into permanent dependents of the state. I get the feeling that’s the “equity” they’d like to impose on all of us.

I’m not certain if there’s any point anymore in keeping track of President Biden’s poll numbers, other than for the same kind of curiosity that comes with watching a limbo contest: “How low can they go?!” For those keeping track, they just went even lower. The latest Civiqs Poll found Biden’s disapproval holding steady at 55%, but his approval rating dropping from 37 to 34%.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/05/31/biden-is-furious-that-hes-below-trump-in-polls-but-it-just-got-even-worse-n572713

I’m not certain who the people are who approve of how things are going, but 34% approval is down there with heat rash and ketchup on salmon. Biden’s approval rating has even dropped to 35% in his home state of Delaware. He’s even at 42% approval/46% disapproval in California (But that could partly be because he’s not instituting even worse policies fast enough for some California leftists. Here’s a good example, and brace yourselves for maximum insanity.)

https://www.breitbart.com/education/2022/06/01/california-state-senate-passes-bill-to-allow-schools-not-to-report-threats/

There are only three states where Biden’s approval rating is higher than his disapproval rating – Vermont, Massachusetts and Hawaii – and Hawaii is the only one where his approval reached 50%.

Biden’s approval rating is now lower than Trump’s, and Biden has gotten a free ride from the media while Trump was vilified on a daily basis. According to NBC News, Biden is reportedly furious that his approval rating is lower than Trump’s, and he’s casting around for a “better messaging strategy.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/report-biden-rattled-approval-rating-sinking-trumps-pleads-aides-new-strategy/

I’ve written about this many times before: whenever leftist policies crash and fail, as they inevitably do, it’s never because the policies don’t work. It’s always because the public just doesn’t know how successful they are because the media are so biased against Democrats. I know, when you put it into words, it sounds even crazier.

Guy Benson at Townhall.com recounted some of Biden’s excuses, blame-shifting and self-pitying rationalizations for Americans not liking the problems that his own policies have created.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2022/05/31/lets-talk-about-that-nbc-news-story-on-biden-white-house-chaos-n2608000

Biden is reportedly pushing his staff "to make a sharper case for all that we have accomplished thus far." I don’t think that’s going to help. Most Americans are well aware of what he’s accomplished. I report on that every day.

I also don’t think that whining about all the problems he inherited is going to help. He knew the problems and ran on a promise that only he knew how to fix them. He also inherited a rebounding economy, a secure border, three COVID vaccines, cheap and abundant oil and gas, and a plan for withdrawing safely from Afghanistan. If I’m going to feel sorry for any President, it will be whoever takes over the job from him.

Maybe the most worrisome Biden complaint is that he thinks he’s making clear, succinct statements and then his staff rushes out to contradict and correct him. The media are concerned that that plays into Republican messaging that he’s weak and incoherent. Yeah, that’s the problem. Not the weakness and incoherence, but the Republicans pointing it out.

The reign of terror and error by transgender activists might finally be coming to an end, judging by several news stories that all came in over the weekend. First, another top executive at Netflix defended Dave Chappelle's and Ricky Gervais' right to make jokes about trans people as a free speech issue, just as comedians make jokes about anyone else, despite the furious calls for boycotts and censorship and the hyperbolic claims that joking about the excesses of trans activists will cause people to die.

https://news.yahoo.com/netflix-says-standing-dave-chappelle-171600618.html

Even some members of the trans community are speaking up in defense of Gervais, saying that he’s not attacking trans people, he’s speaking truth to power about the excesses of trans activists. One trans journalist wrote, “Trans activist ideology has run unchecked for too long, and it is time to call it to account."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/some-members-of-trans-community-support-ricky-gervais-amid-netflix-backlash/ar-AAXV4DE

“Harry Potter” creator J.K. Rowling has also refused to knuckle under to the cancel crowd and continues to speak out in defense of women (as Gervais would say, the old-fashioned kind, with wombs.) She was attacked for tweeting a news story about terrified women inmates at a New Jersey prison where officials are housing violent male felons who claim to “identify” as women. But HBO is still seeking a new creative deal with her.

https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1530576557839994882

And then the most surprising and possibly portentous pushback of all: the New York Times actually ran a story Sunday on the trans takeover of women’s sports that not only fairly presented the concerns of female athletes (who came across as much more sympathetic than the selfish “#MeFirst” attitudes of the trans activists they quoted), it actually included comments from doctors. These experts who have medical degrees (and I assume, eyes) said that swimmer Lia Thomas does have an unfair advantage because going through puberty as a male confers physical advantages that a year or even four years of testosterone-lowering hormones cannot reverse.

Of course, irrefutable biological facts aren’t enough to stop Thomas, who now wants to compete against women in the Olympics, where officials are still easily cowed by accusations of transphobia.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10871087/Trans-swimmer-Lia-Thomas-says-doesnt-need-anyones-permission-swim-woman.html

Sister Toldjah at Redstate.com sees all these things as hopeful signs that the tide of public opinion is finally turning against the tidal wave of radical transgender insanity that’s engulfed society over the past two years. Or at least that people are finally growing spines.

https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2022/05/30/breakthrough-ny-times-story-on-trans-athletes-more-proof-dems-are-losing-woke-culture-war-advantage-n572340

I think the trans people who are defending Ricky Gervais are right: these radical activists are doing them more harm than good. They say they just want to be accepted to live their lives like anyone else, but the radicals are insisting that they be treated as a special class, with the right to never be called out no matter how unreasonable they are, to never be laughed at (as we all are at times), and to have the power to destroy anyone who criticizes them.

They claim to be a poor oppressed minority and say that any criticism of them is “punching down,” even as they’re the ones crushing other people. News flash: When people are cowering in fear that you’ll glare their way and destroy their lives, careers and reputations just because they told a joke you don’t like, you aren’t a powerless underdog. You’re that monstrous child who sent people to the cornfield on “The Twilight Zone.”

Here’s the kind of story that somehow tends to get released on late Fridays of holiday weekends when nobody will notice it: an internal State Department document proves that, just as many of us suspected and said so at the time, John Kerry and other former Obama officials were secretly meeting in 2018 with Iranian officials, continuing to conduct their own US foreign policy.

https://www.westernjournal.com/bidens-slip-tongue-denigrates-entire-political-system-democracy-not-perfect-never-good/

Some of the topics they discussed included “nuclear weapons, potential prisoner swaps, [the] Afghanistan withdrawal and negotiations with the Taliban.” While President Trump was deciding on sanctions and trying to extricate us from their bad Iranian nuclear deal, they were acting as if they were still in office, trying to preserve it by conducting their own US foreign policy and signaling that Iran should stand firm against America and the policies of the actual elected President.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the former Obama officials “working against their own nation’s policies alongside such a brutal regime” was “bad stuff, dangerous stuff, un-American stuff,” and that they “should be ashamed of themselves.”

Actually, it's far worse. They were illegally conducting US foreign policy with a hostile nation in an attempt to undermine the official foreign policy of the elected President. To accurately use terms that Democrats love to throw at their political opponents, it was sedition and insurrection, possibly treason, and at the very least, a clear violation of the Logan Act that they’re always trying to pin on other people.

Between current National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s alleged role in launching the groundless Russian Collusion investigation and “climate czar” Kerry’s illegal attempts to conduct secret negotiations with Iran, exactly how many treasonous individuals are currently on the Biden Administration payroll?

Over the weekend, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi was charged with DUI in Napa, California, after he reportedly crashed his Porsche into a Jeep while driving home from a party. Nobody was injured, and his attorney denied a report that it was a second offense, claiming the earlier DUI was someone else with the same name.

A spokesman for Nancy Pelosi said, "The Speaker will not be commenting on this private matter which occurred while she was on the East Coast."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/house-speaker-nancy-pelosis-husband-paul-arrested-in-california-charged-with-dui/ar-AAXRuYv

Nice job of distancing herself from her husband by a continent. I have a feeling their house will be as frosty as her two luxury refrigerators when she returns home.

I could do an essay about how Nancy holds her political opponents to the strictest standards and wants to send them to jail for any offense, real or imagined. But since there could be personal issues at play here with her husband, I’m not going to pile on, at least not yet. However, I will turn the floor over to one of my writers, Pat Reeder, for a rebuttal of her brief statement:

“The reason I never knew my grandfather, and why my late father was never able to attend college, is that a drunk driver killed my grandfather when my dad was in high school. He had to immediately go into the Army, then to work to support his mother and younger brother. Because of that drunk driver, I was the first person in our family to be able to attend college. So please don’t tell me that DUI is a ‘private matter.’ It’s a matter of public safety that can have massive repercussions for innocent people. A car with a drunk at the wheel is just as deadly a weapon as a gun. I’d like to see you pretend to be just as concerned about the former as the latter.:”

While Democrats and much of the media continue exploiting the terrible Uvalde school shooting to promote gun control and repealing the Second Amendment, we’re learning that much of what we were initially told about the police response was wrong. That’s why Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was so furious that he was given false information to pass along to the public.

The latest story in dispute is the claim that the shooter got in because a teacher had propped open a door that was supposed to be locked. Not willing to take the fall, the teacher hired an attorney who says that video proves she heard men at the funeral home across the street yell, “He’s got a gun,” and she kicked aside a rock that was holding the door open and slammed it shut. She assumed it would automatically lock because it was supposed to. It did not, and it was reported that neither did another door in the school, despite nearly $70,000 being spent on security measures a few years ago.

https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2022/05/31/cops-wrong-again-uvalde-teacher-says-she-didnt-prop-open-door-that-shooter-used-to-enter-n473120

There was also this (warning!) very disturbing story about yet another giant red flag involving the shooter that apparently was ignored.

https://www.westernjournal.com/stomach-churning-video-shows-tx-school-shooter-holding-bag-dead-cats-sick-smile-face/

As for the investigation into why the police stood outside for 45 minutes while the shooter murdered children and teachers until Border Patrol agents finally arrived and ended the siege, it was reported that local police stopped cooperating with state investigators. The Department of Public Safety issued a statement claiming that the local police and school district were cooperating, but the Uvalde police chief hadn’t responded to a follow-up interview request made two days before.

https://www.westernjournal.com/uvalde-school-police-chief-not-cooperating-state-investigation-robb-elementary-massacre/

 

Meanwhile, “Beto” O’Rourke has flip-flopped yet again and now once more backs confiscating everyone’s AR-15 rifles, saying this “may not be politically popular.” I think that’s a rare understatement for him. If that tasteless stunt he pulled at the press conference didn’t end any chances he had of being elected Governor of Texas (and those were snowball level chances in Hades to begin with), this should do it.

https://www.westernjournal.com/beto-orourke-flips-backs-mass-confiscation-ar-15s/

But it’s not just Texans who are rejecting the argument that guns are to blame for school shootings. A new Rasmussen poll of likely voters asked what is most to blame for young men shooting up their schools.

https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/poll-americans-blame-mental-health-more-guns-mass-shootings

Only 30% put most of the blame on access to firearms. Forty percent blamed it more on mental health. That aligns with comments made by the parents of both the Uvalde and Buffalo shooters, claiming that COVID lockdowns had made their sons estranged from their families, paranoid and susceptible to radicalization via the Internet.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/covid-paranoia-suspected-factor-buffalo-uvalde-mass-shootings

Ten percent each blamed family problems or social media, and 4% blamed problems in school.

I imagine at least 40% remember, as I do, when there were lots of guns and boys brought their rifles to school to go hunting afterward, but nobody shot their classmates. That was during a time when America valued marriage and family, two-parent homes, the sanctity of life, law and order, giving children discipline and moral instruction, worshipping God, reading the Bible and keeping sick entertainment like gory violence and pornography far away from kids. The left has been working diligently for decades to undermine all of those things, and now when amoral, disaffected youth with no moral compass shoot up a school, they blame it on the guns.

Ironically, their solution is to disarm law-abiding people who might not need to own guns if their cities weren’t also run by leftists who empty the jails, defund the police and refuse to enforce the laws. It’s all part of an endless cycle of leftists destroying things, blaming it on Republicans, then insisting that the only solution to the problems they caused is more of their policies. They’re like medieval doctors who knew only one cure for every ailment: more leeches.

Here’s a great editorial cartoon that sums up this endlessly recurring cycle perfectly.

https://townhall.com/political-cartoons/2022/06/01/190686?hpnl=true

Former Education Secretary Bill Bennett has similar thoughts on the decline of the family and the influence of fathers as contributors to the epidemic of violent young males.

https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/bennett-texas-school-shooting-moral-decay-parents

 

 

By now, you know that Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann was found not guilty of lying to the FBI, even though he did.

In his statement after the trial, Sussmann said he didn’t lie to the FBI. But that was a lie, too. Special Counsel John Durham had absolute proof, in the form of a Perkins Coie billing record and a text to then-FBI general counsel James Baker saying that Sussmann wasn’t meeting with him on behalf of clients when he really was. But the judge used a technicality to let jurors weigh that second piece of evidence minimally, as it had been handed over to Durham by Baker after the statute of limitations had lapsed. Once Sussmann couldn’t be charged for THAT lie –- the one in the text –- Baker happened to remember some texts, including that one. Isn’t it funny how a lapsed statute of limitations can jog someone’s memory?

So it appears Baker and Sussmann were on the same team. Baker helped Sussmann, and so did the judge, who worked like a champ to keep Durham’s evidence out of the courtroom.

Nick Arama discusses the judge’s ruling on Sussmann’s text message here. He also reviews what Durham managed to expose about Hillary and her campaign, noting there is more to come.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/05/31/we-may-not-like-the-sussmann-verdict-but-the-clinton-campaign-was-nailed-n572799

Durham surely knew by the time the jury had been seated --- maybe even by the assignment of U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee with huge ties to the Democrat Party and the DOJ --- that his chances of getting a conviction in this Washington DC court were nil. Heck, he probably knew it all along, but he had his reasons for pursuing it. Those who insist Durham’s defeat is some kind of “black mark” against his investigation are missing the important stuff.

Durham has exposed what Hillary and her campaign did, which went well beyond the “political dirty trick” of peddling a fake story to the media. They reinforced their fake story by also peddling it to the FBI to push for an investigation. In other words, they went to federal law enforcement under false pretenses to frame a political opponent, and THAT, if you or I did it, would be very serious indeed.

But this jury treated it like nothing. This is evident because the jury forewoman, who doesn’t give her name, has spoken to the media. And now we can see she went beyond the scope of what she was there to determine, concluding that the case shouldn’t have been prosecuted at all. “There are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI,” she told the media.

Oh, REALLY?? What if, say, a Republican attorney for the Trump campaign had gone to a Republican-appointed FBI official with a fake story about Hillary Clinton a few days before the 2016 election, and had flat-out lied and said he wasn’t representing Trump? (Not that anyone would need to peddle a fake story about Hillary; there were enough real scandals about her.) Do you think this solid-Democrat Washington DC jury would just blow that off?

Of course not. They’d call it the crime of the century. They’d say this attorney was working with Russians. They’d blame him for Hillary’s loss. They’d call him an ultra-MAGA deplorable, an insurrectionist, destroyer of institutions, election-interferer. Their quick verdict would be Guilty, Guilty, Guilty. They might not even need any hard evidence, just an accusation by the Democrat special counsel. And that lawyer would be off to jail.

Of course, the judge made it a lot easier for the jury to think this was nothing, as he largely kept Durham’s evidence of the “joint venture” (broader conspiracy) out of the courtroom.

As Jonathan Turley tweeted: “Telling a lie to the FBI was the entire basis for the prosecution. It was the jury’s job to determine the fact of such a lie and its materiality.” As in, ONLY THAT. Turley noted that such a bias, if expressed during jury selection, would have led to this woman being challenged by the prosecution.

And Durham surely would’ve challenged her, but recall that Judge Cooper actually refused his challenge of some members of the jury pool who ended up on the jury.

The kicker: This woman insisted after the trial that politics had not been a factor.

Throughout the past two weeks, we’ve discussed the various factors that people are pointing to now in the post mortem. As Andrew C. McCarthy told FOX News Thursday evening, “In order to figure out this case, I think you really have to make up your mind about what the FBI is. Are they ‘a dupe’ or are they a willing collaborator? Durham has staked his investigation on the notion that they’re a dupe. You have to prove, for materiality purposes in a false statements trial, that the ‘duped’ party actually was fooled. And I think the evidence here was pretty strong that...they weren’t fooled at all by it. They fully knew that they were getting political information from a partisan source. And a lot of what they did was designed to conceal the fact that they knew that.”

All true. But that’s what we think Durham was really in that courtroom to show. Again, he had to know he would lose the Sussmann case, given the judge and jury. We believe this case was, to Durham, a “loss leader.” As you probably know, that’s a term in retail that describes a store selling one item, such as milk, at a loss, just to get people into the store. Similarly, the Sussmann case had to be a loss for Durham, but look at what it accomplished for the investigation as a whole!

In that observation, we are more in line with what Margot Cleveland says in her analysis from Tuesday. “...For all posterity,” she writes, Clinton’s fingerprints will be seen covering the worst political scandal of our country’s history.”

Here’s what she wrote just prior to the jury’s verdict, which, of course, she expected.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/31/even-if-the-jury-doesnt-convict-michael-sussmann-the-special-counsel-has-won/

"...Measuring Durham’s performance by the outcome in United States v. Sussmann would be a mistake,” she said. “...It would ignore the valuable information exposed related to the broader Spygate scandal. Using that gauge as a measure, the special counsel’s office succeeded wildly.”

Her piece is a must-read. It’s infuriating to see how much was made of the Alfa Bank story and the whole Trump-Russia Hoax, considering that it was all based on NOTHING. It became an industry, a make-work program for lawyers. Years wasted, hundreds of attorneys and investigators, many millions of dollars, people’s lives ruined (Michael Flynn, to name one), and the country divided, all over a fake story.

“Justice” became a joke. As Charles Lipson wrote for SPECTATOR, “Despite Sussmann’s not-guilty verdict, his trial revealed the rank odor of Washington politics. It suffuses our courts, our law enforcement bureaucracy, and the mainstream media. It reeks of insider dealing and extreme partisan bias. That stench should alarm anyone concerned about America’s ability to govern democratically.”

This is what the special counsel has exposed, and will continue to expose. Thank you, Mr. Durham.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/stench-from-the-sussmann-verdict/

……………………………………….

More for Durham –- CAN WE BE SHOCKED ANYMORE?

As long as we’re talking about the stench of Washington politics, especially as it centers around Hillary Clinton and Perkins Coie, there’s a related story –- just breaking –- that the special counsel will want to look into, if he isn’t doing so already:

Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Jim Jordan of Ohio received an FBI whistleblower contact about the existence of an actual FBI workspace inside DNC and Hillary law firm Perkins Coie, complete with a portal to the FBI database. In response to a letter sent to them by Gaetz and Jordan, Perkins Coie reportedly admitted they have been hosting this "secure work environment" since 2012.

That’s right, the premiere Democrat law firm –- and, by extension, Hillary Clinton –- had a portal right into the FBI databases. If this is what it looks like, it takes what Hillary was doing as First Lady in the White House with individuals' raw FBI data (remember her mysterious White House “personnel” officer Craig Livingstone?) to a whole new level.

It's how she rolls.  This kind of thing goes back decades for Hillary, with some of the same players bouncing from one scandal to the next. Here’s a little time capsule.

https://dailycaller.com/2016/03/15/filegate-attorney-represents-state-dept-tech-official-who-is-silent-on-hillary-server/

Fast-forward to 2022. “The outlined process certainly points toward a political spying and surveillance operation,” writes Sundance at CONSERVATIVE TREEHOUSE, who has long suspected the existence of something like this. Here are the details.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/05/31/breaking-the-fbi-maintains-a-workspace-including-computer-portal-inside-the-law-firm-of-perkins-coie-the-ramifications-are-significant/

He says that the record of non-compliant searches shows “the same people were continually being tracked, searched and surveilled by querying the FBI database over time.” The scale and scope of these unlawful searches, going back to 2012, was noticed by FISA presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer. And 2012 happens to be the year Perkins Coie first started operating the FBI portal. Also, the dates in the report from Gaetz and Jordan about Perkins Coie are “in direct alignment,” he says, with Collyer’s report on unlawful searches..

He sees this as “having the potential to be extremely explosive.”

The story is so far-fetched, we didn't know how seriously to take it at first, but be assured, it's verified.  Gaetz appeared on Tucker Carlson's FOX News show Tuesday evening to talk about this, and he dropped another bombshell:  For the past year, the attorney working out of the FBI's "secure location" at Perkins Coie was...(drum roll, please)...
MICHAEL SUSSMANN.  He with the "Get Out Of Jail Free" card.
Gaetz said he's spoken to former federal prosecutors "on the Judiciary Committee and throughout the country" about this, and he hasn't heard of any similar set-up with a private law firm.  Sussmann, he added, is "an election lawyer," which raises even more questions.
Gaetz and Jordan are demanding immediate answers from FBI Director Christopher Wray.
This office needs to be shut down.  "The Democratic Party shouldn't have this special access, special 'portal,' to the FBI," he said, especially since we know their focus on digging up "oppo" research to use against their opponents.
AMERICAN GREATNESS has a report as well.

For the past two weeks --- the last one completely dominated by yet another horrific and senseless school shooting --- I’ve brought you the day-by-day report and detailed analysis of the Michael Sussmann trial, as unfolding in federal court by Special Counsel John Durham. Some might wonder why we’ve paid so much attention to a case that most major media aren’t bothering to cover at all.

Here's why:  I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that the Durham investigation could be the last thing standing between us and the total loss of our system of justice. It doesn’t stand or fall on this particular trial –- with this judge and jury, it’s almost certain to be an acquittal, even with incontrovertible evidence that he DID IT –- but on the investigation as a whole, and what it reveals about the big picture.

John L. Simon, writing for THE EPOCH TIMES, concurs, and has written a commentary called “Why We Are Praying for John Durham.” When it comes to Durham and the deep state he's exposing, Simon is reminded –- in a more secular way, of course –- of that old gospel song, “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands.”

He’s dealing with something “extraordinarily significant,” Simon tells us. “He holds in his hands the future of democratic government under the law, republican (small ‘r’) or otherwise, as we know it –- if not forever, for the foreseeable future.”

https://thescotfree.com/opinion/why-we-are-praying-for-john-durham/

It’s taken a long time to get here, mostly because of the COVID lockdowns that kept the special counsel from convening a grand jury and pushed him to the edge of the statue of limitations, but now, with the testimony of Hillary’s campaign manager Robby Mook, we know Hillary herself was aware of the plot and that even though she knew the Alfa Bank story was unverified, she personally gave the order to use it anyway. Incredibly, she had her campaign frame her political opponent for what could be considered a treasonous offense –- being a covert agent of the Russian government.

You know, Hillary has done some bad things in her time, and has always gotten away with them, but this takes the (Devil’s food) cake. Sure, she’s responsible for mishandling classified documents as Secretary of State with a “secret server” arrangement to keep her dealings out of reach, and then deleting the evidence –- even having it destroyed it with hammers –- but this hoax takes us to a whole new depth of Hillary-ness, at least that we know about so far. And it seems to us that if treason was committed, it was by HER and her allies. As Simon writes…

“While this all may not be treason in the legal/technical sense, it’s certainly as treasonous as any behavior that has come from the political class of either party in any of our lifetimes and, though completely ignored by the legacy media whose culpability in it was nearly total, vastly more serious than Watergate that they still obsess about.”

“Whether or not you believe in American Exceptionalism,” he says (and we’d like to think it still exists, or could), “the country that has been almost since its inception the envy of the world was busy stomping on its own institutions and itself to the edge of being unrecognizable. Could our enemies have asked for more?”

As for this trial, he reminds us that all Sussmann needs for an acquittal is ONE JUROR and notes the similarity to the O.J. jury, as we have. It’s likely that, in solid-blue Washington DC, every last one of the jurors voted for Hillary in 2016, probably even believing that Trump really was being helped in his campaign by Vladimir Putin. Some of them might still believe it. It’s not as if the mainstream media and the DOJ had come out and issued an apology or anything.

But this might not matter, because, as Simon writes, whether Sussmann is convicted or not, “the door has been opened to explore the ‘myriad accomplices’...”

“The question is, will the buck stop at Hillary or will she be thrown under the bus so the other denizens of our political class from the FBI to the White House can skate?” Simon is thinking beyond Hillary, we assume to Main Justice and even the Oval Office. Usually it’s Hillary throwing other people under the bus; this time, depending on who else might be implicated; she might be the one covered with tire tracks.

He says it’s in Durham’s hands “to steer our ship of state back to the rule of law. If not him, who?” And we’ll continue focusing on his effort. In Simon’s words, “It’s our job, every one of us, to disseminate it --- factually and with a minimum of rancor --- as widely as possible as the truth emerges.”

Law professor Jonathan Turley is doing the same, and he has a great opinion piece in THE HILL, “Friends with Benefits: Sussmann trial is a black eye for the FBI.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3504813-friends-with-benefits-sussmann-trial-is-a-black-eye-for-the-fbi/

Turley writes that regardless of how quickly the verdict comes in for Sussmann, the verdict for the Department of Justice needs “little deliberation.” He calls Durham’s investigation “an indictment of a department and a bureau which, once again, appeared willfully blind as they were played by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

He points out the irony of it being Sussmann’s DEFENSE team that implicated Hillary as personally approving what he was doing. We would add that this was probably Durham’s strategy all along, though even he might have been surprised at how easily that testimony was elicited from defense witness Robby Mook.

Even on the stand, former general counsel at the FBI James Baker made it clear that he and Sussmann were friends –- as in, on the same side –- and that the real adversary was the special counsel. “This is not my investigation, it’s yours,” he said to prosecutors who were pressing him for information.

Joe Pientka told FBI agents that they were being ordered by the 7th Floor (Director James Comey) to investigate the Alfa Bank story, even though it had seemed preposterous to cyber analysts from Day 1. “It’s not an option,” Pientka emailed Special Agent Curtis Heide.

Of course, the FBI clung to the unverified “dossier” as well. As Turley writes, their eagerness “magnifies concern over the bureau’s alleged bias or predisposition on the Trump investigation.”

Jake Sullivan is implicated as well. He had to know the Alfa Bank story was unverified, yet he’s the one who created the sensationalistic bullet points to go along with Hillary’s tweet about it. This liar is currently working in the White House as Biden’s national security adviser. Remember this next time Sullivan comes to the podium to inform the nation about ANYTHING.

Will Durham even be allowed to write a final report on his findings? That’s hard to say, with Merrick Garland running the DOJ. Many in Washington no doubt hope there won’t be one, which is precisely why there MUST be one. Durham will find a way to get it out there.

………………………………..

Postscript

BAD DAY IN WASHINGTON, DC

by Laura Ainsworth, staff writer

The 1955 movie BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, starring Spencer Tracy and a fine ensemble cast, ran last weekend on TCM, and I decided to see it, not realizing it was a morality play with obvious parallels to the Durham special counsel investigation.

It wasn’t intended to be allegorical at the time it was made; in fact, the director tried to minimize comparisons to the blacklisting of the ‘50s. But now –- as conservatives find themselves being the ones blacklisted (“canceled”) and called insurrectionists –- I see amazing similarities to Durham’s investigation of the Trump-Russia hoax.

The setting is a tiny, completely isolated Western town, Black Rock, which, to me, symbolizes the Washington bubble. The law has broken down there, as the sheriff is a figurehead, totally ineffectual. This town is run not by him at all but by a handful of corrupt men who put him there and have him and everybody else intimidated. About four years previously, they did a very bad thing that they’ve so far managed to keep under wraps. But a stranger arrives in town asking questions and sniffing around.  He encounters obstacles at every turn but remains quietly undeterred.

The heart of the film resides in the less powerful characters who individually have to decide if they’ll continue to be controlled by the corrupt leadership of the town or take a risk and help the stranger find out about what they did and escape to tell the tale.  This is also their only hope of cleaning up the town.

Does that sound like the Durham investigation or what?

Memorial Day

May 30, 2022

Once a year, on the last Monday in May, we set aside a day to honor our fellow Americans who made the greatest of all sacrifices so that the rest of us could continue to enjoy the blessings of liberty and security. Although this has been an especially tragic month, with many innocent victims to mourn, we can’t let this day pass without paying our respects to those who gave their lives for our freedom and security, both recently and long ago.

Memorial Day was born after the Civil War, when families would take a day to tend and decorate the graves of Confederate soldiers. It soon spread to the North, and became known as Decoration Day. Eventually, it became a national holiday to honor all American military veterans who gave up their homes, their families, their very lives -- everything they had, or ever dreamed of having – all in sacrifice for their country. And just how many have made that ultimate sacrifice? Brace yourself:

From the Revolutionary War to the War of 1812, the Civil War and Spanish American war, World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the other wars, police actions and rescue missions around the world since 1776, over one million, three hundred and eight thousand Americans have died in uniform.

Imagine if all those soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen could come back to life for a Memorial Day parade. Picture them marching past in rows of ten, each row taking just 10 seconds to pass. That parade would stretch on and on, row after row, 360 rows per hour, for hour after hour, 24 hours a day, for over 15 straight days. That is the enormity of the military casualties America has experienced since 1776. That doesn’t even include the millions more who sacrificed their limbs, their sight, their peace of mind, and the best years of their lives, all for us.

Makes you realize just how ignorant and slanderous it is to claim America's history is built on slavery, racism and selfishness instead of freedom, compassion and sacrifice.

Today's military members, like those before them, risk their lives to protect the cherished American principles of liberty, equality, democracy, fighting tyranny and defending the weak. Previous generations guarded these bedrock principles so that they could be passed down to us. It is now our sacred duty to preserve them for future generations.

Every year, the American Legion sells poppy pins to support veterans and their families. May 27th was National Poppy Day this year (https://www.legion.org/poppyday). I hope you bought one and are wearing it proudly. If not, you can still go to the website, buy their merchandise and support them.

The poppy became the symbol of Memorial Day, thanks to the famous poem, “In Flanders’ Fields,” by Canadian Lt. Col. John McCrae. He wrote it in memory of his friend Alexis Helmer, whom he watched die in battle in World War I.

The poem starts, “In Flanders’ fields, the poppies blow,

Between the crosses, row on row…”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47380/in-flanders-fields

Read the poem at the link. It's very short, but it conveys a powerful message of the depth of those soldiers' sacrifice and the debt we owe them all.

With the pandemic receding, we can once again gather in most places to show our support for veterans and our gratitude to those who gave their lives to protect our freedom. But even if you can’t, you can still proudly fly the American flag today. And we can all offer support to some of the many great veterans’ organizations, such as the VFW and the American Legion.

Another great new organization with an especially timely mission is Code Of Vets, founded by Air Force Veteran, Gretchen Smith. She and a staunch supporter, the late Charlie Daniels, once appeared on “Huckabee” on TBN to talk about the group’s efforts to provide support to veterans struggling through the pandemic. You can learn more and donate at http://www.codeofvets.com. It’s tax-deductible, and with their 1% operating costs, you can rest easy knowing that 99 cents of every dollar given goes directly to help veterans in need.

And of course, one more thing we can all do from wherever we are is stop for a moment and think of all the rows and rows of crosses in veterans’ cemeteries…say a prayer of thanks to them…and remember that each and every cross represents a genuine American hero who made the ultimate sacrifice for all of us.

McCrae’s poem ends, “To you, from failing hands, we throw the torch. Be yours, to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders’ fields.” If you really want to memorialize these greatest of American heroes, then take up the torch they passed to us. Hold it high, and never let it drop.

With the lockdowns finally over, and in spite of record gas prices, many Americans are desperate to get out of the house and go to beaches or parks to celebrate Memorial Day weekend as the unofficial start of summer. But let’s not forget that Memorial Day means far more than that. It’s a day set aside to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice to provide for us the unprecedented freedom that we so often take for granted as Americans.

In a story that appeared last year in the Epoch Times, veterans talked about the meaning of Memorial Day, and all of them made it clear that it isn’t about them, but about their comrades who never made it back home. One explained the meanings of our military holidays by saying, “Veterans Day is for those who survived and retired. Armed Forces Day is for those who are still serving. Memorial Day is reserved for those who never got to take off their uniform.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/veterans-speak-about-memorial-day-its-not-about-us_3836117.html

Despite the distortions of America’s history that so many people want to force into our schools, the fact is that no people in the history of the world have experienced the liberties, opportunities or prosperity that we have enjoyed as citizens of the greatest country on God’s green earth — the United States of America. I don’t say that as a biased American, but as one who has traveled the world and who can scour the pages of human history and say definitively that no nation has ever given its inhabitants the degree of freedom, security, and pursuit of happiness as has this extraordinary experiment in government called the United States.

Our Constitution is a simple, yet profound, blueprint for a government in which the ultimate power rests with the people and not with a king, a tyrant dictator, a military general, or even an elected official. The genius of our nation is that the people have been vested with the highest power, and while we temporarily grant it to those we elect, we don’t give it away (even during a pandemic.) Sometimes, our leaders need to be reminded of that, which is what free speech and elections are for.

This great system of self-government with its separation and balance of powers and its accountability to the people has been and continues to be protected against both foreign and domestic threats by those who trade their clothes of choice for a uniform and who trade their personal liberties to accept orders from someone who outranks them.

In the process of providing that protection, in wars and other police actions over more than two centuries, more than one million of those in our military have given their lives for those of us who will enjoy this long weekend. No American should take this for granted nor ignore it. It shouldn’t be left to the Gold Star families alone to take a pause for a somber reminder of the price of our benefits of citizenship. We all owe it to them to show respect in some way for those whose deaths gave us our lives.

This year, May 8 was the 77th anniversary of World War II’s VE Day (Victory in Europe) and August 15 will be the 77th anniversary of VJ Day (Victory over Japan.) Even if there are no commemorative events near you, parents should use the Internet to teach kids about VE Day and VJ Day.

For kids who’ve heard derogatory comments about the military, these anniversaries are a golden opportunity to teach them that the rights, freedoms and comforts they enjoy were paid for with the blood of patriots: over a million soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. To cite just one war alone, many people today unconscionably water down the meaning of the term “Nazi” by hurling it thoughtlessly at political opponents.

This Memorial Day, especially in light of the shocking rise of anti-Semitic attacks by those who are ignorant of what World War II was about, please teach your children about the real evils of Nazism and the tens of millions who died because of it. Fly your flag, be proud to be an American, and give thanks and prayers for the 16 million Allied military members in World War II – over 405,000 of them Americans – who heroically gave their lives to stop it.

Closing statements were given Friday morning in the Michael Sussmann case, and the jury started their deliberations that afternoon. Since this is Memorial Day weekend, they’ll come back Tuesday to continue deliberating.

The jury will determine whether or not to convict Sussmann of lying to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker when he told him in his office –- never mind the incriminating text we’ve all seen from the day before –- that in meeting with him to discuss the (phony) Alfa Bank story, he wasn’t representing any clients. As FOX News reported Friday, Sussmann’s attorneys slammed Durham’s case against him as “misdirection.” On the contrary, his evidence that Sussmann lied to Baker is as direct as it gets.

Tammy Bruce, sitting in as host on Friday’s HANNITY, talked with FOX News legal analyst Gregg Jarrett and Trump attorney Alina Habba about the case. Jarrett jokingly referred to the defense’s argument as “A lie is not a lie if the recipient of the lie realizes it’s a lie.” He said that was the most outrageous rationalization for a lie that he’d ever heard.

In paraphrasing the defense’s argument, he showed how they contradicted themselves and actually incriminated Sussmann, their own client, “by saying, first, he really wasn’t representing Hillary Clinton during that FBI meeting, and then in the next breath...‘But because the FBI figured out he was representing Hillary Clinton in that meeting, it’s not really a lie.”

Jarrett seconded Jonathan Turley’s comment that this is the worst jury he's ever seen in his life. “This is a jury that is stacked with Hillary Clinton supporters,” Jarrett said, “[including] three Hillary Clinton DONORS… The problem is, there really are no Republicans in Washington DC, from which the jury is drawn. You’d have a better chance of spotting a unicorn than a Republican in Washington DC. And so...the defendant is hoping they will acquit him simply because he hates Donald Trump and they do, too.”

The way this case is being tried certainly supports President Trump’s argument about the two systems of “justice.” And Habba, Trump’s attorney in the case he’s filed against many (including Hillary) who damaged him by spreading the fake Russia Hoax, said he was well aware of that. “I mean, the man knows how corrupt it is,” she said, “and that’s why he’s so passionate about defending this country, and ‘correcting’ the country.”

(By the way, she mentioned that he attended the NRA convention at this sensitive time “because he cares about this country.” Trump, from the podium, said the name of every child killed in Uvalde and rang a bell for them.)

As for the Sussmann trial, she said, “I feel like I just sat through two weeks of the soap opera about the demise of America. It was despicable. And to see a jury that --- I hope they come to their senses. When you have a text message that so obviously states, ‘Hey, I’m about to lie to you”...how can you not call that a lie?

She said the defense spoke of this case as “a David Copperfield trick,” adding with a laugh, “That was the best they had. If I ever as an attorney have to do that, please, Gregg, come get me and tell me to step down.”

Seriously, though, it could be that Sussmann’s attorneys don’t think they even have to try very hard, given this jury. In a normal case, a person such as you or I found guilty of this charge might easily spend a couple of years behind bars. As Jarrett pointed out, Sussmann is “actually very lucky that he wasn’t charged with conspiracy to defraud the government by knowingly, willingly peddling phony information to the government.”

Of course, that whole group of disingenuous low-lifes involved in the Russia Hoax, including Hillary, should face that charge. Bruce questioned the fact that they weren’t all charged with conspiracy, but as we’ve said earlier, Durham saw the writing on the wall if he were to bring that case to a DC jury. He didn’t want to put THE big conspiracy case in front of them and lose. Better to use a small case to get the real story out.

Still, as Jarrett said, “Lady Justice peeks beneath the blindfold, and weights the scales of justice. If you’re a Republican, it’s weighted against you. If you’re a Democrat, it’s in your great favor.”

Consistent with that, a couple of days into Sussmann’s trial, Jonathan Turley compared the way Sussmann is being treated in his case by Judge Christopher Cooper with the way Michael Flynn was treated in his, by Judge Emmet Sullivan. Flynn’s case was held in the same Washington, DC, courthouse, but what a difference. This is a must-read.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3492664-tale-of-two-trials-how-sussmann-is-receiving-every-consideration-denied-to-flynn/

Recall that Judge Sullivan abused Flynn in his courtroom, suggesting that Flynn should be charged with treason --- which was never on the table --- and saying to him, “I cannot assure you that if you proceed today, you will not receive a sentence of incarceration. I am not hiding my disgust and my disdain.” Recall also that Sullivan tried to continue the case against Flynn even after it had been dismissed by the DOJ, apparently planning to serve as judge and prosecutor rolled into one.

Legal analyst Margot Cleveland posted her update on the case Friday morning, after the judge had issued his instructions to the jury. Her view coincides with that of other jaded trial-watchers: 1) the evidence against Sussmann is overwhelming, incontrovertible proof of his guilt, and 2) he probably won’t be convicted.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/27/why-the-jury-should-convict-michael-sussmann-of-lying-to-the-fbi-but-probably-wont/

She mentions something we hadn’t seen reported that dispels all doubt his meeting with Baker really was on behalf of Clinton’s campaign. Did you know Sussmann even billed the campaign for the two THUMB DRIVES he gave to Baker? Gosh, you’d think that for $800 an hour, he would’ve thrown those in for free.

Cleveland goes on to show how tightly Durham had this case wrapped up, evidence-wise.

But the defense benefits, she says, from the “disinterested approach to justice” exhibited by the witnesses Durham called. He wasn’t “out to get Sussmann,” Baker said on the stand. If the defendant had lied to them and misrepresented himself, the FBI hardly seemed to care. And if those witnesses are going to shrug off the lie, Cleveland reasons, the jury probably will, too. No big deal, right?

Going further, just about everyone in that DC courtroom –- defendant, defense attorneys, witnesses, jurors –- sees Durham as a political enemy. Does that mean the jurors will simply ignore the facts and the law of this case and use the process of jury nullification to say, “hey, we’re Democrats, we don’t give a rat’s behind what this guy did”?

Quite likely. But even if they do,, the case Durham brought was so airtight that we can say, with complete confidence, Sussmann DID this. We also can say that as an attorney for Hillary’s campaign, he did it with her approval. There shouldn't be a need to put the word “alleged” in front of the charge Durham made against him. Whether this jury finds him guilty or not, Durham showed that he criminally lied, in service to Hillary Clinton, and we all know it.

The Price of Gas

May 27, 2022

Triple A reports that as of Tuesday, the average price of a gallon of regular gas was $4.598. As noted by Western Journal, that’s an increase of 35.5% since November 23, 2021, which is when President Biden announced “a major effort to moderate the price of oil, an effort that will span the globe in its reach, and ultimately reach your corner gas station, God willing.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/new-numbers-show-high-gas-prices-skyrocketed-since-biden-began-major-effort-lower/

The global effort doesn’t seem to be going so well. Saudi Arabia just announced that it won’t make any further efforts to increase oil production. They say there’s plenty of crude oil but the problem is refining capacity, so they won’t pump any more than they are now.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/oil-price-outlook-saudi-arabia-commodities-surging-world-economic-forum-2022-5

November 2021 was also just over three months before Putin invaded Ukraine and gas prices were already high enough to justify a global effort to moderate them, so these aren't "Putin price hikes." What it would really take is a domestic effort: stop waging war on our own oil and gas industries.

Speaking of that, I hate to bring you more bad news, but this story reports that one of the few bright spots for US energy prices is that we pay about one-fourth as much for natural gas as Asia and Europe does. But an industry expert said that over the next six months, our prices are expected to surge and line up with other nations’ prices. That’s more of the “equity” of high fuel prices that Democrats have long argued for as an incentive to force Americans into small electric cars.

So when you hear Biden talking about bringing down gas prices and they only keep going up, remember that someone who really wants to bring down prices doesn’t do everything in his power to make them more expensive.

I generally don’t comment on political statements by Hollywood celebrities. But since Michael Moore seems to have some inexplicable influence over the “progressive” left, and I was on “Hannity” last night when this story was brought up but didn’t get the chance to address it, I thought I’d briefly respond to Moore’s call to repeal the Second Amendment (and he’s hardly the only one doing that.)

As one might guess from its name, the Bill of Rights is not a list of privileges that the benevolent government generously grants us. It’s a list of God-given rights that the government can never take away. You can’t repeal the Second Amendment any more than you can repeal the First Amendment. Now, somebody please tell this Administration that they can’t repeal the First Amendment.

It’s also beyond irritating to hear the same people who sided with teachers’ unions on keeping schools closed despite the growing evidence of stress and mental illness it was causing children, and who have promoted a culture that undermines families and erodes respect for the sanctity of life, and who backed “progressive” DA’s who’ve sparked violent crime waves that forced law-abiding citizens to buy guns to protect their families, now blame Republicans for youth violence and demand to take guns away from law-abiding citizens.

Kevin Downey Jr. at PJ Media has more inconvenient truths about school shootings that demolish many of the talking points.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2022/05/25/mass-shooting-facts-to-shut-down-your-liberal-sister-in-law-and-her-annoying-man-bunned-non-binary-boy-friend-at-your-memorial-day-bbq-n1600774

Frankly, I resent being forced to talk about politics at a time like this, but I can’t let outrageous false attacks just pass unanswered. However, this time should be reserved for prayer, mourning and comforting the families, and for coming together to talk about real solutions that would help prevent these senseless assaults on innocent children from ever happening again.

There are things that can and should be done to make schools safer, but leftists actively oppose them. As former Boston, L.A. and New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton pointed out, the “Defund the police” movement included demands that safety officers be removed from schools because somehow, having a police officer on school grounds allegedly made kids feel “unsafe.”

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/05/25/bratton-during-defund-insanity-there-was-push-to-take-cops-out-of-schools-crime-crisis-created-by-the-politicians/

The left accuses Republicans of having an “irrational love of guns.” I certainly don’t love guns, but I love the Constitution, and I don’t see the point of laws that violate the rights of innocent people while doing nothing to prevent crime (we had an “assault weapons” ban for a while; it was allowed to lapse because it made no difference.) But why can’t the left acknowledge that it has an irrational hatred of police?

The father of a school shooting victim has proposed a three-point plan that could actually help prevent such horrors. It could be implemented with some of that “COVID relief” money that was showered on schools that are still trying to find something to spend it on.

https://www.westernjournal.com/father-school-shooting-victim-3-point-plan-protect-schools-doesnt-involve-banning-guns/

Former Attorney General Bill Barr agrees with him…

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/05/26/bill-barr-explains-the-only-way-to-prevent-school-shootings-n2607834

The points don’t include useless new gun laws, but they do include having an armed guard at schools, the same sort of armed guards that liberal celebrities and politicians rely on for their own security. Would they agree that our children deserve the same level of security that they enjoy themselves? If so, then let’s talk.

PS – Matt Vespa at Townhall.com offers some concrete examples of how school resource officers have prevented potential school shootings.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/05/25/one-policy-that-seems-to-work-when-it-comes-to-protecting-our-schools-n2607781

Before we get started on the Sussmann trial update, there’s one piece of business that needs to be addressed. Yesterday, I wondered how much the high-powered Perkins Coie attorney Michael Sussmann was charging Hillary For America for his consequential little FBI visit. Those fancy DC lawyers cost a pretty penny --- I was thinking $500-600 an hour. That kind of money adds up fast, into the millions, and it’s why Michael Flynn had to sell his house to defend himself against limitless malicious prosecution.

But I have to admit, we were wrong. A top DC lawyer is apparently even pricier. As Miranda Devine at the NEW YORK POST put it, “[Sussmann] is hoisted by his own petard because he couldn’t help but charge the Clinton campaign $800 per hour...to perpetrate this dirty-tricks campaign against Donald Trump on behalf of Hillary Clinton.”

That’s right, folks, $800 per hour. But, hey, Sussmann billed just 3.3 hours for the day, and given the events he set in motion with his visit to FBI general counsel James Baker, Hillary must have thought it was money well spent! As Devine said on “FOX & Friends” Thursday morning, “She sanctioned, she approved this attempt to dirty-up Donald Trump and paint him as an agent of the Kremlin. The ramifications of that dirty trick went on, crippled the Trump presidency, did great damage to this country, [and were the] source of a lot of the rancor and division that we see now.” What a bargain!

And it was a drop in the bucket, considering the millions Perkins Coie was already receiving to fund Fusion GPS and, through them, the Steele “dossier.” Fusion GPS only paid Christopher Steele $168,000.

Devine summarized: “It may seem that the charge [against Sussmann] is small, but actually, the ramifications and the report that will come from John Durham are momentous. And we should all pay very close attention to it.”

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2022/05/26/miranda-devine-dishes-on-delicious-details-of-durham-case-predicts-ramifications-will-be-momentous-1242908/

Now, let’s catch up on Day 9 of the trial. First, we learned that closing arguments will begin Friday morning because Sussmann is not taking the stand in his own defense. (Too bad, but did anyone seriously think he would?) On Thursday morning, he declined to testify, and the defense rested.

Also, Durham has just been handed a potentially serious problem. In a couple of rulings Thursday, the Obama-appointed and heavily conflicted judge in this case, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, erected some huge obstacles for the special counsel. As legal analyst Andrew C. McCarthy wrote for FOX News, they are a “predictable but damaging blow to the prosecution” that make his case against Sussmann much harder to prove to the jury.

First, even though the text Sussmann sent to Baker is THE smoking gun –- ironclad proof that he lied to Baker –- Judge Cooper ruled that prosecutors must rely not on that text but on evidence that he actually told the lie the following day, while meeting with Baker, in Baker’s office at the FBI. That’s the insane degree of hairsplitting that is going on.

It stems from a legal technicality. McCarthy explains it in detail, but in a nutshell, it’s because at the time of Sussmann’s indictment, prosecutors didn’t have the text, so he wasn’t charged for THAT lie. Why, then, didn’t Durham create a superseding indictment that included both lies as separate counts? The problem is that the five-year statue of limitations was about to kick in when Durham charged Sussmann with lying in Baker’s office. The text to Baker didn’t come to Durham’s attention for another six months –- when Baker says he found it and turned it over –- and by then the statute of limitations had lapsed. Even just altering the original charging document to include anything about that text would invite legal objections. So Durham was stuck.

But, as McCarthy explains, the text isn’t out of the trial completely. It’s been presented in court, and Judge Cooper is permitting prosecutors to say it’s strong evidence that Baker’s memory is correct when he says Sussmann told him in his office that he wasn’t there on behalf of clients. What prosecutors can’t do is tell the jury that the Sussman’s text alone provides the proof he was lying (EVEN THOUGH IT DOES). Got that?

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/michael-sussmann-john-durham-fbi-trial

Unlike the text, Sussmann’s verbal lie is one man’s word against another’s. It was said with no witnesses and no notes taken. Baker said under oath that he’s 100 percent sure Sussmann said it, but other statements have been inconsistent, and Sussmann has pleaded ‘not guilty.” If it’s just a matter of who’s more believable, this jury is filled with DC Democrats who want to believe Sussmann. After all, he was just trying to save us from Trump!

Nick Arama at RedState.com had a similar take on what the judge did, even linking to McCarthy’s analysis. This judge has taken a case that should be simple and cut-and-dried, with the proof RIGHT THERE, and made it as hard to convict as he can. He wouldn’t even allow the tweets from Hillary that show how she capitalized with lightning speed on the Alfa Bank hoax. Judge Cooper was wrong not to recuse himself from this case; we’ve addressed his conflicts before and they are staggering.

Then there’s the jury. As Jonathan Turley has noted, “I mean, he [Durham] is facing a jury that has three Clinton donors, an AOC donor, and a woman whose daughter is on the same sports team as Sussmann’s daughter. With the exception of randomly selecting people out of the DNC headquarters, you could not come up with a worse jury.”

Between this judge and this jury, one might be reminded of the O.J. Simpson trial, except with Judge Ito replaced by Al Cowlings.

https://heavy.com/entertainment/2016/06/al-cowlings-oj-simpson-now-wife-today-murder-trial-white-bronco/

The media no doubt sense that this jury will acquit Sussmann no matter how strong the case against him, and that’s why they’re laying low right now. If he’s acquitted –- and the verdict might come as early as today –- they’ll spring into action and use the verdict to trash the whole Durham investigation, never mind what it has found.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/05/26/judge-just-threw-another-roadblock-into-durhams-case-against-sussmann-n570655

And Durham continues to find a lot. Testimony from Wednesday revealed that Rodney Joffe was actually the same source for two separate “tips” that falsely connected Trump and Alfa Bank. So he needed Sussmann to lie and say he wasn’t approaching Baker on behalf of clients, so he, Joffe, could still hand off his phony evidence to other people in the FBI. Joffe himself was apparently (surprise) an FBI confidential human source. This is one more reason for Sussmann to lie.

It came out through cross-examination of a defense witness, FBI Special Agent Tom Grasso, one of the people to whom Joffe had given “white papers.” For when you have time, Margot Cleveland will tell you all about it.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/26/court-testimony-shows-spygate-conspirators-deceived-the-fbi-using-same-strategy-twice/

Finally, while we wait for the verdict, here’s an excellent review of the Sussmann trial thus far. It calls the trial “part of a three-ring circus, showcasing sleazy political enablers, malfeasance by public officials and biased reporting.” We have to “walk behind the elephants with a huge shovel.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/sussmann-trial-exposes-dems-scandal-industrial-process/ar-AAXLrMH

My friend Mike Rowe is the latest to allegedly be targeted by the government for his political beliefs – even though he doesn’t even talk about his political beliefs!

https://www.theblaze.com/news/mike-rowe-dirty-jobs-permit

Mike says he was all set to shoot an episode of his show “Dirty Jobs” on boilermakers when the Government Services Administration suddenly yanked permits they’d had for months, claiming vague “security concerns.” It ruined months of costly preparation, caused his freelance crew to lose work and have no time to line up other jobs, and kept the boilermakers from being able to show America what they do.

Mike said he’s shot shows in all sorts of sensitive government environments, from the Capitol to a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, and never had a problem. Then he said he got a call from someone high up in the GSA, telling him that another GSA higher-up didn’t like his “personal politics” and deliberately strung him along just to yank the permits at the last possible second.

If true, this is not only yet another example of politicized bureaucrats arrogantly abusing their power, it’s also stupid. Mike Rowe doesn’t discuss his personal politics, and he pointed out that his foundation is “aggressively nonpartisan” and gives scholarships to liberals and conservatives alike. All he can figure is that the petty tyrant doesn’t like the fact that his show “How America Works” airs on Fox Business.

I’ll add that his great show “The Story Behind the Story” airs right after “Huckabee” Saturday nights on TBN. Maybe that’s why the GSA jerk’s nose was out of joint. I spend too much time telling you the sleazy stories behind how Washington works. And now, we have another one.

Tuesday, there were primary elections in Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama, runoffs in Texas and a House Special Election in Minnesota. Let’s begin with the most important news of all:

https://redstate.com/carcand/2022/05/24/sarah-huckabee-sanders-wins-arkansas-governor-gop-primary-n569427

In their infinite wisdom, the good people of Arkansas voted for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to be the GOP Gubernatorial candidate by over 83%. (By the way, as an indicator of how reliable polls are this year, she was at 56% going into voting day.) I’m sure she’ll be the best Governor of Arkansas in a generation. She still has to beat Democrat Chris Jones in November. I don’t want to jinx it, but I feel good about her chances, especially considering that in their primaries, Sarah got nearly 288,000 votes to Jones’ 69,000.   

And now, for the less important races…

In Georgia, former President Trump saw a rare loss for one of his endorsements with Gov. Brian Kemp easily defeating Trump-backed David Perdue by about 3-1. But Trump-endorsed NFL legend Herschel Walker won a 69% landslide to challenge uber-leftist Sen. Raphael Warnock.

In Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, Democrats have tried everything from deplatforming Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to accusing her of insurrection to trying to keep her off the primary ballot. Yet, her race was called when she was in the lead by over 70% with 44% of votes counted. There’s virtually no chance she will lose that seat in November, which means Nancy Pelosi will likely be looking up at her as she works on fixing America as part of the House majority. Incidentally, I notice that even a conservative-leaning paper like the New York Post refers to MTG as “far-right.” Isn’t it funny how we never hear any Democrats described as “far-left,” even if they’re openly socialist?

In Texas, Trump-endorsed Attorney General Ken Paxton crushed a challenge from George P. Bush, winning his primary by over 2-1. The media had framed this as a test of whether the “Bush dynasty” still reigned in Texas. I suspected that the “Bush dynasty” has long been something that lives only in the imaginations of media yakkers who haven’t actually talked to a Texas Republican in 20 years, and this proves it.

In Texas’ 28th Congressional District runoff, incumbent Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar declared victory, even though with 94% of the vote counted as of this writing, it’s too close to call yet. He’s slightly ahead of genuinely far-left challenger Jessica Cisneros, who is endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC and various radical left groups, and would be the latest “Squad” member if elected. Cuellar is a DC dinosaur: the last remaining pro-life House Democrat, and he spoke up against open borders. For that reason, “progressives” want him replaced with another looney leftist.

The closeness of the primary vote shows how out of touch activist Democratic primary voters have become with the general population, since that district has been trending red with most thinking people rejecting the crime, drugs and devastation wrought by Biden’s willful failure to secure the border. If Cisneros does somehow eke out a win, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cuellar runs an independent or write-in campaign. But that would split the Dem vote in what’s looking like a red wave year, good news for Republican Cassey Garcia, who won her runoff with 57% of the vote. Hopefully, the angry leftists will have delivered a safe Dem seat to the GOP. 

In Alabama, Katie Britt and Mo Brooks (who had Trump’s endorsement but lost it) will have a runoff for the GOP nomination for Richard Shelby’s Senate seat.

For the latest numbers on other Tuesday races, click this link:  

https://redstate.com/redstatestaff/2022/05/24/live-election-results-georgia-alabama-texas-minnesota-and-arkansas-n568988

 

 

This Memorial Day may be a good time for Americans to ask ourselves: Do we still deserve our freedom? I’m not talking about our slumping economy nor even descrying our media’s unblinking distortion of issues from our porous southern border to the perfidy of Hillary Clinton. But today we are seeing the tumultuous confluence of two basic decisions reached nearly 50 years ago: the “right” of abortion decided by Roe v Wade in 1973; and the adoption of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) in 1974. While each choice was made separately, their protagonists could hardly have imagined how those separate choices would evolve to create twin challenges to our way of life.  

 Barely a year apart, two fundamental norms of American life had changed. The right of an unborn infant to live was now outweighed by the right of the mother to choose life or death for her baby. The historical obligation of the American citizen for wartime service had also changed, now becoming a career choice like pursuing orthodontics or agri-business. The rationales were correspondingly different. Abortion, whether or not guaranteed by the Constitution, needed to be safe and legal; the Vietnam-era draft simply needed to end. Fifty years later, we have an expensive, professional military in which less than half of one (>0.5) percent of Americans defend the other 99%. The death toll since Roe v Wade: at least 60 million infants although no one knows for sure.

As one of the last draftees, my reprieve came too late. But ten years into the AVF experiment, I served on the West Point faculty, once moderating a campus-wide debate on the role of women, The contending advocates: conservative doyenne Phyllis Schlafly versus Sarah Weddington, victorious counsel in Roe V. Wade. Even in West Point’s disciplined environment, the debate was a raucous affair; but at least our cadets witnessed the emotions and intricacies of the constitutional process they would soon defend.

 But for me that argument was settled forever the next year, when our newly adopted 4-day-old daughter wrapped her entire hand around my little finger. I was thankful beyond words that her birth mother, finding herself “in trouble,” decided to protect this new life, choosing to set aside every lesser consideration.  Thirty years later, a father’s emotions still run strong looking into her eyes and each of my three grand-sons!

Meanwhile, the Army kept getting smaller, post-Cold War reductions leaving the active force with a half-million soldiers. But then came the shock of 9/11. The voluminous memoirs of President George W. Bush, his vice-president, and his secretaries of State and Defense reveal a stunning omission: None of them apparently asked whether the AVF could sustain a long conflict. Rather than mobilizing the nation for war, the National Guard and Reserves were dragooned for extended overseas tours. Ordinary Americans were encouraged to return to the shopping malls or college campuses. “So your kid goes to Kandahar while mine goes to Yale. So what’s your point?”   

With the War on Terror dragging  on for almost 20 years, manpower became even more scarce and expensive. Meeting combat requirements meant sending the troops back for multiple combat tours to various hell-holes. Not only were our soldiers running exponential risks of PTSD, but they were also becoming increasingly isolated from American society as a segregated warrior caste. And what happened when these Other People’s Kids returned home as veterans? Although the Veterans Administration is unsure of the exact numbers, they estimate that 17-20 veterans commit suicide each day.·

As you may have noticed, the United States is now involved in two separate Cold Wars but is seriously outmanned in each. (Air Force pilots describe this condition as “discovering you’re out of airspeed, altitude and ideas.”) Making matters even worse are our internal contradictions, voices from the left made even more strident by the prospect that Roe v Wade may be reversed. Listening to them, one ponders our national responsibility for the Holocaust of the Unborn, those Other People’s Kids now being aborted.

As I write these words, my friends and neighbors in Uvalde Texas are grief-stricken by the senseless slaughter of 19 elementary school students and 2 teachers by a gun-toting monster quickly dispatched by local law enforcement. Might this latest outrage finally move our secular, prodigal nation to lower our voices, bow our heads and pray for God’s forgiveness?